


We're Not Friends

by ninety6tears



Series: We're Not Friends [1]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-18
Updated: 2010-07-18
Packaged: 2017-10-10 16:00:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/pseuds/ninety6tears
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When two soldiers in the middle of a war can't seem to like each other, baptism by fire is apparently the natural solution. (AU in which Kara never knew Zak and first meets Lee after the fall of the colonies.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	We're Not Friends

"Oh my gods. You're _alive_?!"

Lee Adama does a fazed turn on the hangar deck and sees this spark of a woman, five-six, blond, and cut with a pair of scissors from the surroundings simply by the astonished look on her face.

He blinks. "Who the frak are you?"

 

"She's our best stick," is the hardly substantial classification of Kara Thrace that Commander Adama gives his son, when the question, Lee believes, went something like who-the-hell-does-she-think-she-is-undercutting-my-command-in-the-heat-of-a-raider-attack.

"If I remember correctly," Bill adds slowly, pushing on his glasses, "she also very personally saved your ass out there."

Lee scoffs. "I'll send her some flowers."

Bill shakes his head regrettably. "You may not like her style of doing things, Lee, but it's too bad. We're hanging alone out here, and you're both good officers. You should try to get along with your pilots."

He twitches automatically at the commander using his first name rather than formalities. "As if it's even professional. Everybody tells me she's your pet lieutenant." Lee has to suck in a breath, stop himself from pointing out things like the fact that having a definite softer spot for one of your officers than for your washed out younger son seems a little screwed up—And he's still thinking about these things in present tense, like back in Delphi Zak is getting a beer out of the fridge and ignoring Lee's messages because it's just not quite on with them anymore, like he'll still have the chance to tell his dad where to stick it before he buys himself a nice suit and tie, goes to school for real this time.

He doesn't have time to grieve and he sure as hell doesn't have time to soften his grudging regard for his father, because there's a war to fight now and thanks to this _girl_, he's still alive to be a good soldier. Bill doesn't say anything; a look across the room from Tigh says it all.

And he gets the message, fine, he'll stick to being Captain Apollo. He's nobody's son.

 

The memorial walls expanding in a mosaic of photos and leafy parchments fill Kara with an invading glumness when she first passes them by, and as she slows and then stops to glance at the hundreds of smiling and blurred faces tacked up together, one in particular catches her eye before she realizes what she's looking at. In the forefront of the grainy colorless picture is a boy in an oversized sweatshirt who can't be older than six or seven, looking at the camera with a detached contentment and not quite smiling. His hair curls endearingly in a couple awkward areas above the ears, and his lips set together in just a certain familiar way...

Kara realizes she's looking at Bill Adama's eyes set into that young face at the same moment she acknowledges the other figure off on the right in the foreground, a more mature boy standing in profile several feet away, hard to diminish, but definitely a younger version of the commander's living son, with just a slight tint of Apollo apparent even then in the way he holds his head.

Kara reaches and gently takes the photo off the wall to look at it more closely. She wonders whether it was the old man or Lee who put this up, and feels fleetingly like the half of the photo with Lee in it should be tucked under; her mind envisions where the crease would go, but of course she doesn't, it's not her business, but the contemplation brings up that grim question about Lee's survival. If he was the one who put the photo up, he left himself willingly next to his brother, and Kara can only attempt to imagine trying to weigh absolute grief against any gratitude that he managed to make it out alive. She didn't have someone like that growing up and she's more than aware it's not something she can quite understand.

She keeps having this feeling lately, that she's not supposed to be the lucky one, never has been before, and maybe it's the people in the photos who got all the luck.

"What are you doing?"

Kara gasps, nerves tightening in recognition of the voice. Lee is almost just behind her with an accusational look. She rolls her eyes in apologetic exasperation.

"I'm sorry, I was just..." She has no idea what to say.

"What?" Lee asks cynically, stepping forward and taking the picture away from her. "Sending up a prayer?"

Yeah, so he doesn't take her for the spiritual type, and that's kind of a trap right there: If she denies it, she's predictable. If she argues... "Maybe I was," she says with a dry shrug.

"Right," he scoffs.

She is not going to say anything. Not here, while he is holding that picture of his frakking _brother_, she is not going to—

"You know...I don't get this. You don't _know_ anything about me—"

"We're not doing this," he cuts her off, and part of her understands it, empathizes that he just can't, as he gives a shake of his head. Part of her just doesn't care.

After a long hesitation, after he's replaced the picture and is probably about to walk away, she says, "You liked debate club."

He looks back over, startled. "What?"

"You read a lot of Lystra novels in your teens. You have never introduced your father to a serious girlfriend. You may, in fact, have boyfriends, for all he knows...You used to set your alarm on traditional Tauron music, because you dislike it."

Squinting, he demands, "What, my father just tells you these things?"

She swallows. "Zak...liked to play pyramid. Sometimes you would let him win. That's pretty much the list, Apollo, but it's more than you can say about me...But here's something." She pulls out Lee's hand, pushes something into his palm.

Hard and wrapped in cloth, a figure of Venus. Lee furrows his brow at the figure in his hand as she just walks away down the hall.

The next day he comes by where she's sitting at a briefing and nudges her to sit up straight, surreptitiously setting it on her desk as he walks by.

 

Most of the pilots like talking to Kara, and Lee proves pretty quickly to be a good CAG, a bit of a hardass at times but at least showing the occasional attempt to unwind, give companionable praise, permit jokes before he gets started tearing up all the problems with their strategy in the ready room. He isn't popular, but easily likable, in many ways the opposite of Kara in where he stands with everyone else.

Absolutely nobody on the ship looks forward to flying a CAP with both of them. Ever.

It's interchangeably fascinating and annoying to the other pilots, the fissuring sparks that seem to get set off even when they really really _try_ to agree, especially when the one nugget who had the gall to blatantly snicker at it got coined with the first embarrassing call sign Kara could think of. In terms of training and planning, Apollo's got rank and Starbuck's got some people's familiarity with her tactical smarts, and nobody knows who to side with. This manages to infuriate Lee almost every single day.

And then there's the drinking. Which, he accepts pretty quickly, is probably completely out of anyone's hands, but he still can't help a pointed scowl across the rec room when she knocks a chair or table over during rec time. She almost seems to do it to excess just to prove that she doesn't give a shit what he thinks. Sometimes, for a second, he catches himself wondering whether she truly doesn't.

And anyway, on a battlestar, the air gets so polluted with too much information on everybody, it's not like he chooses to file away certain things he overhears from the conversations he's rarely engaged in.

"Nuh-uh," she says during some drinking game or another, peeling some liquor down. "At least nothing serious."

"Never?" Boomer exclaims.

"Oh, poor me," Kara intones with an exaggerated pout. "There was this guy when I was like sixteen, but that doesn't count. I mean, what about you?"

Valerii is blushing, but Kara is too busy glaring at Lee after noticing his slightly too obvious eavesdropping from a table over.

"_What_?" he says.

 

After _Galactica _jumps away from the cylons by a hairline Kara and Lee already know they're in such shit trouble that neither of them particularly wants to get out of their Viper ever again. But they do, and since the commander is on_ Colonial One _when it happens, Tigh has taken the pleasure to march right out to the deck to greet them, making them simultaneously flinch with the anger in his voice.

"Starbuck and Apollo. _TEN-HUT_!!!" He bears on the two who are now standing straight and still, letting everyone else on the deck have a casual gander at the scene. "That first raider was up on dradis before _either_ of you caught it—It was on our nose in less than five, how in hell did you _both _manage to miss it?"

He already knows the answer, but he's waiting for one. The two pilots stand sort of shell-shocked, lips pressed tightly shut.

"We were distracted, sir," Kara admits.

Lee sighs, knowing it's no use to dance around it. "She was arguing with me about the formation again—"

"You were on my ass about it before I even—"

"_Can it!_" Tigh growls, shaking his head in grim wonderment. "I don't know what the _hell _is the problem, but we are in the middle of a frakkin' war and you two can't be in the same gods-damned stellar system without trying to kill each other. Now whatever it is you have to do, it has got to _stop_. I don't care if you have to have it out in the gym or do a little heart-to-heart over breakfast, but figure it out. Hell, you can_ sleep_ with each other for all I care..."

From behind the Viper Chief is currently pretending to examine, a brief sniggering is heard. Lee and Kara both roll their eyes just slightly, and the shared annoyance loosens them up, a little. When Tigh is done with them, they stand side by side for half a minute before Lee, sighing, finally speaks.

"I admit you had a good point yesterday about the reassignments. Yeah, don't look at me like that, we both know that's why you were rearing to blow up at me since this morning. I'm done talking about what just happened if you are."

She responds with a favoring shrug and starts to unzip her smock. He's kind of impressed, really, that her face has only a slight trace of cocky victory.

But only a week later when they're in CIC and have been bickering for at least thirty minutes about how they're going to get some gods damned tylium, she interrupts him with, "No. I'm not having a frakking 'attitude,' Apollo—"

"You keep talking like I don't know how to—"

"I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that I'm better at your job or that you're not doing yours. I'm saying do better, cause you are better. Look at this..." She gives an irritated _Why don't you frakking understand?_ sort of gesture at the plan they've hashed out so far. "You're starting off with your strongest numbers. This kind of situation, you need to plan like the need for a back-up is a _given_. _I_, am just trying to keep your short ass alive so that your father doesn't lose it completely," she finishes off in a grumble to herself.

Lee is suddenly looking at her more closely, until she notices. Then he kind of shakes into looking more dazed, like there's something she just doesn't get, and he takes the bait. "If the old man really cared that much—"

"Please do not finish that sentence. I've managed not to belt you up until now." She manages to cut off his response quickly: "You both just lost his _son_."

"Yeah, whatever, he's your favorite. You have no idea how much of a son of a bitch he can be." She glares, so he can't help going on. "Do you have any_ idea_ what it was like for me growing up without a father, when he could've been there if he really wanted to be?"

Something strange happens to Kara's face, like one emotion is pulling the other back kicking and screaming. She takes in a deep breath, and lets it out. There is a long, long pause, in which he starts to belatedly realize he's maybe made a very bad move.

She clears her throat, and as if this is all she's been contemplating for the last several seconds, starts explaining to him what they would need to put up a good decoy. He rolls his eyes with a sarcastic "Oh, why didn't I think of that?", knowing their previous argument is at least easier.

 

Apollo pulls through sneaking right under the cylon's asses like the little maverick he apparently is, and everybody on the ship is so giddy over the success of the tylium mission, she really can't help being happy for him. She joins up with the drinking and celebrating out on the deck, smiling from slightly afar to see Lee quietly accept a handshake from his father; her restless irritation from not being out on the mission is vicariously alleviated by the deserving glow around him, the sheen of sweat she usually wears with gleaming triumph.

After grabbing a bite in the mess hall, Kara stops into the racks, intending to change before joining the gambling that'll doubtlessly be starting in the rec room. She has to do a double take when she finds Lee in there, presumably having just gotten a shower before changing into his sweats, just sitting at the long table going over a small pile of papers, likely their next recon plans, with a lone glass of alcohol in front of him that has only a few shots' worth and his hoodie lazily zipped barely more than halfway up. With wide-eyed snickering wonder, she goes by him on the way to her locker exclaiming, "You've got to be kidding me."

He calmly protests, "Keep it to yourself, would you?"

"No, seriously, what are you_ doing_ in here? Are you trying_ not_ to make friends? You should be accepting toasts and lapping ambrosia out of somebody's cleavage."

He can't help a short laugh. "Yeah, it's not really my scene."

She's at her locker, changing, while he casually averts back to studying the papers at the farther end of the table from her. Before closing her locker, she pauses, then takes something out. She goes over after a second and places it in front of him; it's a shiny long silver case. Her last stogie, a gift from the commander after her close call on the red moon a while back. He shifts up slightly, consternated.

"You deserved it," she says. Rather impersonally, but sincerely.

Lee looks at it for a long spell of a moment, and finally he says, "I don't want it."

She looks down at him in irritation, like he's not following the script, reaches out to take it back. She catches enough of him glancing back at her as she does to see that there's almost some worry there; he thinks he may have actually hurt her feelings.

Then she says, "Well, your father did want _me_ to have it..."

He sinks back, hardened again. "And there it is."

"There's what?"

"You're pissed it wasn't your victory, so you're on my ass with the usual gloating about how Daddy loves you the best."

"I'm not on your ass about anything," Kara says aggressively. "If I was, I'd be making fun of how scared you were that you weren't gonna cut it with the best pilot stuck in CIC with a bum leg."

"You are unbelievable..."

"Oh, admit it. You were all worried about what ol' pop would think if you botched up the mission."

Lee doesn't say anything, but he looks very bottled-up. Apparently she's going to ruin his evening no matter what she does.

Kara takes a drink from her water bottle; when she lowers it, one finger lifts out from the neck to point at him. "Hey, I'm not the one who thinks it, you are. You know..." She pauses with a tiny little matter-of-fact laugh. "Maybe if you put things into perspective a little bit, you'd realize that my relationship with your dad is not my way of having a pissing contest with you, considering that you weren't even _around_ the first couple years I was working for him—"

Lee bitterly spits, "That doesn't mean you know anything about him."

"_Yeah_?" Kara manages to make the act of grabbing her cane look more threatening than comical before she starts walking along the length of the table back over to him, bearing down on his level. "Look, here's what really frakking irritates me about all this. I don't claim to know more about your father than you do and I never did. But whenever you get into your 'Frak daddy' modes, you say all this crap about him, about the way he raised you, that just doesn't really sound like him to me. And if I say this to you, you'll just get pissed and tell me I don't know shit, instead of actually considering that he's not the same man he was a long time ago."

Lee's eyes slowly raise up to meet hers, still glaring, as she picks up his glass and takes a swallow, dangling it loosely in her hand.

"I just don't know about you, Apollo," Kara went on in a sour tone. "Sometimes I think you feed off being angry at him so much, it's like you'd rather not admit it if he's changed."

Lee has a dour look that now says, _I'm not listening to this shit._

She resigns to a more combative tone again. "Frak, well...Just to set the record straight that the bitterness is more than returned. I care about the old man and you're a little asshole to him and it's disappointing. I guess I've treated him more like a father in the past few years than you have in your entire life."

In a spurt of almost petulant anger, Lee's leg shoots out and kicks the cane out from under her. As she stumbles and catches her fall with a clumsy and painful-looking graze of her ribs to the table, the glass is dropped and rolls across the floor, having left a trail of spill down her pant leg. She groans an incoherent syllable and rubs at the fabric. Without bothering to retrieve the cain she just grumbles, "Bastard," and hits Lee with a slap to the side of the head like a bullying sibling.

Still irritated but apparently having decided they're even now, Lee tries to signal a will to ignore her by going and sitting on the edge of his bunk. But Kara does a roundabout limp circling the table, grabbing her bottle on the way around the end and then catching Lee looking away in the next few seconds: She quickly goes for his hood, pulling it back enough to pour a fleeting amount of water down his neck. With a wordless irritated outburst, he knocks the bottle down and pushes her arm away, stands up and shoves her harshly back by the shoulders.

The two have often come very close to getting into a physical fight, but not quite that far, and tonight isn't going to be a first. These lazy motions all play out with harmless outcomes, driven by the irrational energy of the competition and dealt with no real force behind them. The hazy mirth of the evening comically seeps through their childish attacks, which have slowly gone from malice to mischief: Adopting some feeble intention of humiliation, Lee reaches up to grab her hood, pulls it over her head and down covering her eyes, then pushes it back with the aim to mess up her hair, even mopping his hand through it a little. Her next move is clever lightning motion when she manages to jam his arms sheepishly in his sleeves by pulling the loose collar tightly down over his shoulders, grinning in amusement at the sight of his arms pinned at his sides. Annoyed and wriggling free as she's diving away for some other thing to throw at him, he manages to snatch her by one arm, shoves her against the rack wall and grabs around the drawstring holes of her zip-up, mirroring her action with a sharp tug.

But with the rapid pull, the zipper gives, undoes: Kara is suddenly unfastened except for just a couple inches above her waist. She's got the bra underneath, no big deal, but in the end his maneuver went pure slapstick and he's the one embarassed, Kara triumphant. He notices her bare stomach bouncing slightly with restrained laughter, and he looks up with an expression of sore defeat to meet the steely arrogance in her eyes, the patient smirk, the _What the hell are we even doing?..._

They stand that way for a few seconds, Lee brewing mad and her still managing not to laugh.

Then maybe Kara feels sorry for him, or maybe it's the next part of the game, he doesn't know. Her hand reaches up to her zipper. Her eyes, still bearing into his, take on a darker gleam just before she unfastens the bottom, and the sudden breath as Lee's body is already tilting forward is the sound of him very quickly getting it.

First he pulls the sweater quickly off down her shoulders, stopping at her wrists so that her arms are restrained behind her back, their bodies pushed together and faces propped close. He kind of measures her up with a close look, before his head ducks down just slightly lower.

Another few seconds, and she invites him with a rugged sneer of a smile. The kiss happens, at once all soft and testing and abstract, then with sudden but subdued elation. Not careful but open and slow until Kara takes the dare and slips in, tastes, prodding a sleepy hum of contentment from Lee, a motion of his hips he can't help. His hands eagerly reach up for her face and neck, allowing her finally to wriggle her arms free and begin to work him out of his clothes.

They go from Lee's back rolling sharply against the table by Kara's pushing-pressing-touching to her collapsing and grappling under him in his rack, sticking fast with however they fall in on top of the sheets as he untangles her legs from the stubborn knotting of her pants and underwear. Kara naggingly mutters a needless warning to be careful with her knee as he gently props her leg around his hip. His forearms reach forward to frame her around the shoulders, their manners still carrying on like a game of chicken with her eyes always jeering him on, do-we-or-don't-we; but then her next thought is interrupted by the action of his dauntless answer, forcing her mouth shocked and slack, shutting her up.

If it's still a contest, they seem to go about it like the loser is the one who rides off first, and all the insistent movement is almost too much for the space of one bunk as Kara boldly eases the captain out of his steady manners, budging his body into all the right tremors. They let out their mindless wordless noises, all on the same startled octaves at the very fact of what's happening; he finally manages against the tremble that's aching to ride through him, with the right rhythm and a drag of his lips down her neck, to send her head soaring back with her voice kicking out a crackling sound that quickly turns into a groan of "_Gods_—I _hate_ you—"

"—know I know I _know_..." Having won, Lee is letting himself go with his face buried at her shoulder, mumbling against her in strangely agonized nonsense, and Kara's head tilts attentively to the side, hearing something. A second later she's easing him off and then grabbing the curtain, managing to close it not a second too early before somebody enters the room.

She doesn't have to give Lee a glance to know he's not going to make a sound. They hear some footsteps, the twang of a locker opening, a couple small shuffling sounds, and then whoever it is clacks the locker shut and walks back to the hatch, opens it and leaves. And somewhere, some second, between that entrance and the moments-later shutting of the hatch, Lee Adama clearly just realized that he has now slept with Kara Thrace.

She's shifting up, cool and uncaring except for a hint of a perplexed grimace as she slips back into her underwear. Unable to meet the practically gaping face she can almost feel him landing on her, she doesn't even give him a final glance as she wordlessly rolls over and slips out of his bunk, closing the curtain behind her.

 

When the first thing she says to him the day after is a completely unremarkable "Where's Chief with the check-lists?" while she licks out of her Viper, cooling off the last few hours of her cap with a blinky headshake, he thinks that this isn't going to become so awkward after all.

He's wrong.

 

The conversation that he shouldn't have overheard goes something like:

"I was drunk."

"So was I."

"I don't care. I don't need you to be a frakking gentleman, just get off my case. That was almost a week ago."

"Well...three days—That isn't the point. Listen, the way I was afterward was, I admit, an appalling display and lapse of any kind of...uh—"

"Really? You can stop talking now and shake my hand and walk away."

Her tone, embittered, good-humored at the same time. His, sheepish.

Lee thinks it's a little strange for her to be talking to the vice president this way, whatever's going on, but he understands nothing and thinks nothing of it, practically forgets about it.

That is, until an idle moment of his lunch break, when he revisits overhearing that oddity of a conversation between two people who usually seem to naturally repel each other. This thought organizes into a cut-and-dry classification: _Baltar is the only person who annoys her as much as I do_.

The comparison sticks. His mind draws a clean line to some previously noted, purely peripheral information, unfolding from the first musical bursts of the election ball to that gods damned dress, to what? To his cocktail glass tipping up to his face while, at the corner of his eye, the newly elected appeared to be attempting a sweet-talk on an already furled-up Starbuck, at which time Lee assumed she'd stick him in her ashtray where the sleazy bastard belongs.

But now, how the event must be pulled out and reclassified and placed among this new information and, Oh. Oh. _Oh_.

His first instinct is that he should find it funny. He waits for this to happen.

"So maybe you could help me straighten out a rumor," he says to her out of the blue after the nugget crowd disperses away from them in the ready room, "that you only sleep with men you can't stand."

He has apparently failed to find it funny.

Kara goes completely still for a second, then flicks her pen cap a couple times before tossing it down on a desk, hard enough that it flies right off to the floor; she turns to him with this look like she was just waiting for him to have the nerve to bring this up, and that she would've calmly preferred the worst forms of torture.

She says, "I can already tell this is going to be _completely_ uncalled for."

"I don't know, Starbuck, maybe I'll just get a kick out of hearing you admit it."

She now actually looks confused by the level of pretense, unable to form a response for a moment. "Why are you being such a dick?"

"I just want an explanation," Lee says sharply.

"Oh. Right." She nods bitterly. "You want me to come up with some reason I was misguided or psychotic or drunk enough, so that I'm basically apologizing for sleeping with you, so that it's my fault you did something you really didn't want to do."

What got him here is by far the most idiotic train of thoughts his imagination has ever subjected him to; that night's entire game of jokes leading up to the different heat, the undeniable fun of it when their anger had peeled into a softer kind of fire, has all gone through his mind all over again, but with other men both familiar and faceless, over and over maybe ten times. The unplaceably bothersome emotional _absurdity _of it has compelled him to this; being a dick, he'll admit, isn't making him feel any better.

After what she said he's thinking, Get out of this. Apologize. Frak, Frak, Dammit. _Shit_.

The problem is, he's still mad.

He opens his mouth and says, "You must get this a lot."

She flinches half a step forward, her fist balling at her side; a second later, though, he might as well be floored by the fact that she hasn't hit him. And the profoundly bullied look she wears as she puts forth the forced effort to control herself, he thinks, is worse than if she'd knocked him a pretty purple color somewhere on his face.

"Don't frakking talk to me, okay?" she says. "Outside of doing our jobs, don't even look at me. I'm serious."

She clenches her arms together again on the way out of the door. Now completely sobered from his aims at pestering her, not understanding himself, he has no idea how the last minute happened. He kind of kicks at the floor, shakes his head and mutters to the room, "Lee, you're an asshole."

Naturally, the course of the day necessitates speaking to her. With as few words and as little eye contact as possible, he has to formally approve her little hot-shot cylon bombing mission which he can't stop thinking is going to be dangerous as all hell. Her attitude is crap, she doesn't bother standing at attention and he just can't bring himself to do anything about it. He hands her his notes on the report and she practically snatches them from him before briskly turning and walking away.

"Lieutenant," he says before he thinks about it.

He doesn't look towards her as he says it and feels like she didn't hear him until she slowly appears at his side, clearing her throat, watching Chief's crew going to work on the raider instead of facing him. A moment goes in silence before she demands, "Sir?"

His gaze doesn't move from the floor a few feet in front of them. The taste of the words seems like it should chew at his chords on the way out, but the sentence comes aloud in an unexpectedly soft way.

"I'm really sorry."

He can't dare to look at her, so he only sees an ambiguous motion of her head. "...Am I dismissed?"

One of the workers is handling the transponder like any other piece of equipment, shaking directions to someone else as they hold it at the side. Lee thinks he's getting a headache. "Yeah, you're dismissed."

And then hours later she folds out of the push of space into another pull, wriggling away from Lee, from his father, and he has enough clarity by now to squint through his irritation and wonder what the commander must have done to piss her off so bad. He implies his suspicions but does not ask.

It's the last conversation he has with his father before Boomer plants two bullets straight into his heart.

It's the closest he's come now, in his mind, to accepting that Kara is really family, because he has to, with his father all cut open and possibly dying. If they don't find a good surgeon, his heart's going to fail; if Kara isn't coming back, it'll probably break. He accepts the burden of her absence on his shoulders even though it makes him feel more alone than he's been since the Cylons first attacked. He tries to fill the space, and feels so fervent and bewildered by anything and everything lately that he doesn't realize it as he's doing exactly what Kara would've done: He fraks up, big time, and lands himself in the brig cell next to Laura Roslin.

And the really funny thing is, after he's gathered that Roslin is what Kara has decided she believes in right now, after he throws his gauntlet down and follows her out into space, what he's doing for her isn't about spirituality as much as principals, but he wants to believe in her too. Maybe because it brings him closer to Kara, which is as close as he can get to his father, the man he hates and loves and cannot lose.

 

\-----

 

Lee says, "Lieutenant."

After boarding the vessel, amazingly, with what he presumes to be the Arrow of Apollo (clearly the gods love her) strapped across her back, Thrace's impossible accomplishment makes it easy for Lee to swallow the remaining shreds of humiliation from weeks ago and greet her respectfully. Her spirits are looking particularly ravaged, but when she sees him her features light up with the type of restrained smirk that he's used to making him feel like there's some kind of joke at his expense. But he must not care just then, since he's smiling back.

"Captain." Her tongue drags over her teeth when she reaches out to shake his hand, quickly but grabbing it tight, like a taunt.

Before she turns to march up to the president, she winks.

 

"Look..." Lee tries to start in with her when they're making their seemingly aimless hike on Kobol, the two of them lagging several yards behind the rest of the oddly arranged party. "Um. Is it okay for me to talk to you?"

Since finding the_ Astral Queen_, Kara's attention to Lee has been virtually nonexistent except for in their short burst of almost violent but impersonal dispute about the toaster she dragged in, and a couple opportunities to fleetingly make fun of him. Somewhat indifferently, she comes out of the pensive silence of her walking to look at him, then rolls her eyes when she realizes what he means. "That was weeks and weeks ago. Not exactly on my mind right now."

"Listen," Lee sighs. "I know maybe you don't care, especially not now, but just humor me? I want to explain myself."

She grants him an amused smile, _This better be good_.

"This is none of my frakking business, okay, and you don't have to tell me, it's just kind of important for you to understand what I was talking about..." Lee sighs, hesitating.

Actually a bit curious, Kara stops walking to give Lee a confused look.

Up ahead, Laura has noticed the stalling; she turns and says something to Helo, who shouts back to them a second later, "Take five?"

Kara returns a quick affirmative gesture; she and Lee put down a couple heavier items they're tired of carrying. After he sits down on the ground, she leans against a tree instead of following suit. He sighs, and stands back up again.

"Come on," she says boredly. "Let's have it, Apollo."

"Did you sleep with Gaius Baltar?"

Her expression quite paintedly goes from initial shock, to being only halfway offended for a few seconds. Then she quite decidely smiles, and gradually falls into laughter.

"What?"

At the crest of a stretched-out giggle, she exclaims, "Really!? _That's_ what that was about?" She falls into another fit of snickers, none of it helped by his annoyance.

"Is it really that funny?" Lee grumbles.

"You have no idea how funny it is. The man's a freaky piece of work. He started saying this _weird_ stuff, like he was talking to himself, right..."

Lee cuts her off with a broadly unsettled gesture, "I—no. Pretty sure I don't want to hear this."

She gives another little _aah_ of laughter. "What _do_ you wanna hear? That you were better?"

He practically coughs, blinking at her and _way_ too close to actually wondering if she means that. "You're the one that's a frakking piece of work."

She scoffs like he's no fun. "...Apollo, what is your _problem_ with me?"

"I guess while we're being frank?" In his discomfort, he laughs. "I can't take you cause you're a frakking mess, Starbuck. You're worth more than half the pilots I've got, but you drink like you're trying to kill yourself and you frak around like you don't have an inch of self-respect."

"That's not even—"

"No, come on, even_ I_ know you don't like Baltar," he cuts her off. "...It's all frustrating as hell. Especially since without all of that, seriously, I sort of..." He finds he can't finish the sentence.

There's a weirdly suspicious look in her expression.

"Really, I'd give my left leg for half of your guts and gods know you are funny as _hell_, but. There's all this baggage there I don't even know what to do with."

Kara lets one of her short, unamused laughs go; she now looks like she has a bit of a sour taste in her mouth, but like she's still processing what he just said.

He mildly interjects, "Of course that's...now. When I met you...Well, I was terrible when I met you."

"It was because of your brother," Kara says. "That's why this thing with your father is so complicated for you, and that's why you hate me so much. It doesn't help that you miss your brother so bad, and I didn't really lose anybody that day, not really. Right?"

Lee's expression seems at first resistant to this possibility, then not so much, like everything she said was true and it wasn't something he'd recognized. After a moment of contemplation, he just gives her a bewildered, "Hell, no wonder we don't like each other very much."

A whistling sound up ahead signals that the break is over. They continue walking in silence for a few more moments.

Lee notices a laugh forming on Kara's face. "What are you smiling about?"

But now she isn't smiling; she's stopping and looking around. With the briefest click of a hand gesture from her he realizes she just heard something, and they both smoothly draw out their sidearms, forming back-to-back.

Before either of them can try to warn the others, the distinct crunch of sticks under feet is heard, and Kara quickly determines the direction, covering it with her sidearm and blocking in front of Lee.

"Hold your fire."

That gruff command grabs a gasp out of Lee, who turns around whispering, "Holy shit."

Kara smiles with relief as Bill Adama appears out of an obscuring tangle of trees. The commander pauses at the sight of both of them. For half a minute none of them can find any words.

Lee just stands there, his eyes flicking over at Kara momentarily, unsure. Finally she sighs, reaches back and grabs his upper sleeve to shove him forward. With that encouragement, he goes the few steps and throws his arms around his father.

She rolls her eyes to herself and mutters, "About frakking time."

 

That night Kara is sitting propped back on her elbows, taking the night watch. Even though she knows the boss is probably also awake a handful of yards away, the darkness dims out her sight of anyone else in their party, making her feel more alone, profoundly bored. Lee, sleeping close under the small propped tent ceiling, has a slight rasp in his breath, and she rolls her eyes. Once she's used to it, though, she recollects and entertains the details of him in bed with her; it's just too amusing with prudish Apollo unconscious right there, unable to do anything about it.

After a minute of this Lee stirs, rolls clumsily over with a soft grunt, and his elbow digs right into her lower left abdomen.

"_Frak_—OW!!!" Seething with the sudden sharp pain, she wakes him with her low outburst and a hard shove that accidentally gets him in the face.

"_What_—?" Lee rears up angrily; then he sees her turning on the flashlight, holding it in her teeth, unzipping her jacket, and beginning to peel off her bandage.

In response to the dawning expression on Lee's face, she puts the light down and cuts him off muttering, "These stitches are ready to come out anyway." As she reaches for her first aid box, Lee tiredly sits up and snatches it over.

"I'll do it."

With the slight toss of her head in the dark, he can tell she's rolling her eyes before she says, "I'm capable, thanks."

"I didn't say you weren't."

She tries to pull the kit out of his hands. "Frak off—Look, just go back to sleep—"

"—_Would you shut the hell up and let me help you_?"

Kara is so startled by the frustration in his raspy hush through the thick dark that the aid kit slides easily out of her grasp. There's a pause, and then with a heavy grudging sigh, she quickly reaches down and unfastens the waist of her pants to cuff it down a bit, cringing a little at the exertion of the sore muscles, and when he hands her the flashlight she leans back and aims the light where he needs it.

Lee is still agitated when he pulls out the first stitch. He grumbles, "I don't understand why you have to be so frakking stubborn."

She boredly replies, "I don't understand why you give a shit."

Still squinting a little in the weak yellow light, Lee shifts down so that his knees and feet rest on either side of her lower legs, his elbows propped gently close to her torso. He is still fixated on the careful task, not looking up at her, when he admits softly, "Maybe I'm a piece of work too."

The rhythm of her breathing relaxes over the minutes, and they stay in silence up until one of the last threads he's pulling away from the pink scar. "So what happened?"

She flatly replies, "I was shot."

"Twice?" He asks this with some doubt but figures out pretty soon she's not going to explain the other wound, if the one he's tending to is in fact from a bullet. Then he stupidly prods, "By a cylon?"

In the faint glow emanating outside the direct stream of light, he can see her shake her head incredulously. "Yes, by a toaster, Apollo. That's what they do, they shoot people."

He's fixing her a new bandage, pressing the edges on gently. When he looks up, maybe to dryly say the all-better, something makes him fall silent.

She heavily adds, "Lots of people." More like she's talking to herself than to him.

His hand is unconsciously stilled on her skin for a few seconds, and Kara is hiding her consideration of him in the dark that swallows her expression, but she can faintly see that he's _thinking_, and an allergic surge of irritation wells up in her stomach against him. This is still Apollo she's talking to. Can it really sink in for him, imagining how hard it must have been for her? Having to skulk around like unwelcome rats on a planet still recognized as a home, now in shambles. Being unable to go back to that ignorance still held by most people that are still alive of what it was really like down there, that she feels ripped-up and almost bloodthirsty now with the comprehension of all that destruction. Or does he think that Starbuck is too numb for that? This is still Apollo. He stung her pretty bad when they were still meeting each other, when he seemed to be trying from day one to make her feel like an outsider on her own ship. He's a frakking hypocrite and he doesn't care about anyone else's pain and...

His thumb is moving as if on its will, in the shyest comforting caress at her stomach. And in the crisp thick air his hand is cool but in a kind of warm way and—it feels just kind of nice moving down around her hip like that.

As Kara's head shifts slowly to look down at him, her expression hardly changes. But she does look.

He arches down and over, above her, and his left hand reaches up to her grasp around the flashlight next to her face. He joins his fingers with hers around the metal handle, and his thumb switches it off.

 

\-----

 

Things get bad, bad enough that Kara's soon butting heads with other pilots even worse than she ever bickers with him. After she's just had a huge argument with Lee over whether Kat should be grounded for the stims fiasco, she goes proudly quiet, undoes one button on Lee's jacket, and heads into the racks. This is how it's usually done, only a lot of the time Kara signals that she's up for it by bending down and loosening her boots before she disappears behind a door, expecting him to follow. This was never verbally arranged and he doesn't remember where it started. He's lost count by now of how many times they've frakked; he's lost track of why, exactly, they have to make a show of barely ever associate with each other, though in all truth, they don't speak much more than they used to just because they're doing this.

When he's actually with her, on the spare days they actually find the time and space, it's usually the most thought he's given to her all day; but then when the form of it occurs, something withers as his body is trapped beyond the bending of those knees, leaving only the sensation that he has been craving this all along. As she coils up with pretty fury, under, above, against the wall, one half of his mind demands to know what he is doing. The other half is asking _What the hell does it look like I'm doing?_ before his brain goes blowing apart into a hundred pieces and nobody's talking upstairs anymore.

He wonders right when these things happen, in a way that he forgets when it's not happening, if she does this too: Gets up and brushes her teeth and does her job and wants him and wants him, not knowing what she wants. What he feels most of the time and has known all along is that he should quit it with this, she is going to make him crazy simply because she is who she is. But there are other less definable places in him that wonder if they are the only thing keeping each other sane.

One day in the shooting range he can feel the boundaries sliding under them, slippery ice, because of the way she's laughing in his direction, even with Hot Dog in the room, after he makes some snide comment complaining about the last time Ellen Tigh was trying to hit on him.

"Apollo, what the frak is that huge stain on your shirt?" There is no stain, and she giggles when he looks down.

He shakes his head while she lets a few rounds off. His head feels weirdly cloudy. "Why are you always frakkin' with me, Starbuck?"

"Unh hah hah..." she sniggers, letting her pistol drop down. "Cause I love the way you do it."

"What?" He laughs, and laughs. "What?"

Hotdog hits the floor, and while Kara is hazily finding it hilarious he's starting to think, _Oh no_.

Five minutes later he isn't sure if he was passed out or not, if he's coming to or not, he just has in his mind a blurred impression of her reaching past him, a body clinging and struggling over him, weakly sliding her grasp down him for the spare round he managed to mutter was still in his pocket. And he recalls wondering in his panic with no particular emotion attached whether somebody finding their bodies mingled together like this would mean that he won the game in the end. He remembers the sound of a bullet finally shattering the glass...

"Apollo!"

As his head clears, she's standing over him, Katrain standing next to her volunteering to help her haul Hot Dog off to sick bay. Kara looks impatient, towardly annoyed at him as he starts laughing darkly beside himself.

"The hell?" Kat mutters.

Kara just says, "He's fine."

 

\-----

 

The arrival of _Pegasus_ makes everything strange, including them. Everyone from _Galactica_ is able to pretty quickly start feeling out what's so off about everything, how they've stumbled upon a huge pretty package of twice the complications they had before rather than a helpful brand of humanity. Adama's crew picks up on the sentiment from each other, even though nobody talks about it; she doesn't like that she's feeling it, but she feels it the most when she's around Apollo, gathers both comfort and irritation from the fact that even he doesn't want to accept everything that's going to change.

It all seems to start with the day they both get called into the old man's office and the first thing he says is, "I'm ordering both of you to be completely silent until I say otherwise." After the two fall into their confused composure, he then goes on to explain that they are both being transferred off _Galactica_, and their mouths are falling open in stupid infuriated silence before he gets to the finish, where he's proclaiming, "I am _trusting_ both of you to handle this with dignity. Part of that means I don't want any single person on that ship mentioning to me that I have two pilots who can't seem to stop pulling each other out of line. Do you understand?"

Both of them are a little too stunned to even gesture a response, but the ensuing silence is affirmative enough.

"If I can't have you two aboard my ship, I at least need to rely on you to be my eyes and ears." Adama speaks at the exact speed that means he is forcing himself to say what he has to say without his own particular judgment, and Kara nearly loses it and barks some curse of protest. "You've both been at least trying...to work together more, or at least that's how I hear it...Well, I need you to do better than that. Understood?"

As Adama goes on to explain who they're both to report to, Kara feels the buzzing sense of Lee looking sidelong at her, looks forward as stoic as she can manage instead of meeting his eyes. But a few seconds later she slips a furtive look in his direction, relieved somehow to note that he is easily just as steamed up about all this as she is.

They are silent in their rage until the next morning when they're setting up on Pegasus, and Kara can't help going to stand over Lee's bunk when the room is all cleared out, leaning in a shoulder and just staring down at him. He gives one bitter, incredulous shake of his head, and she snap-replies, "I mean, what the hell?"

He just shrugs.

"So you're flying a _Raptor_ now? And the old man is just gonna—"

"There isn't anything he can do. You heard what he said."

Kara's mouth is opening to say something brisk, when the hatch opens and two huskily laughing ensigns topple around the door. To Lee's obvious surprise, she lowers down closer to him to continue at a sharp whisper her complaint about something their CAG said to her earlier. Back on _Galactica_ she was never as quick to tell him things, but they both have a lot to get off their chests and there's no one else around who's likely to be as pissed about all of it as she is.

The first day they report for briefing, Stinger proves to be twice as incompetent as she'd guessed. And after he dismisses her comments like some power-tripping school teacher who's never touched a tactical plan, her bristling anger makes her crane her head around, trying not to make it obvious that she's checking out Lee's reaction. But he's looking straight at her and shaking his head in annoyance, and she's just not sure who he's annoyed _with_.

"Remember what my father said?" is what he mutters when he hands her the camera kit in the corridor. She's stuffing it back into the bag out of sight, wide-eyed, smiling.

Things aren't so comparatively smooth between them when her stealth surveillance stunt gets her promoted _above_ him, and there are a couple times she thinks she's about to assure him that she doesn't think that's frakking fair at all, but it snags in her throat. And instead, at the first opportunity that they're both off duty, she sits her back down against the table where he's finishing off an early dinner. "Bunks are empty right now," she mutters without even turning her head towards him. "Wanna follow me back?"

Lee is a little astonished. After a second he starts laughing, and it's bitter but truly amused at the same time. "What, are you trying to make it up to me?"

Unapologetic as ever, she gives him a wry smile. She shrugs. Only five minutes later they're being a lot more obvious than usual when they jam the hatch behind them right as a younger pilot is exiting from grabbing a pack of cards.

 

"Not too—" Her voice is hitching through her fast and ungentle scraps of instructions when she's on one of the long benches, legs wrapping around his movements. "I don't like it when I'm—"

"Yeah, I _know_—" he cuts her off, annoyed and ecstatic and irritated and mindless, "—You think I don't know by now?"

"—_Mmph_," her voice whimpers out, interrupting her own attempts at control as his hand is kneading down her stomach, taking and guiding her hips around him.

In a second, he's starting to smirk a little bit between all the white noise of his own feeling. "You like that, though," he accuses, and she's grunting in protest as he's setting the pace, agonizingly slow.

"_Nuh_," she grumbles, impatient, hating when he does this, teases and teases so frakking slowly while she coils and twists and sweats and _waits_, until she's practically begging for it. "Apollo," she groans, and it's chiding, it's an insult, it's the only thing she ever calls him. "C'mon...Come _on_—"

And it's always worth the worst of her verbal abuse for when he starts doing her in in earnest; it gives him a warm sneering sensation in his chest when the tension thrums and picks up and neither of them can take it anymore and he knows it. He must feel some weird notion to give her something for her trouble though, cause when he has her wrists pinned above her he gives a hungry licking kiss to her mouth, and his thumbs are rubbing caresses into her palms as he hears himself asking, "Can I go down on you?" Her eyes go a little wide.

"Wh—" She swallows. "No."

"Okay." He lets her hands go, gets back up to supporting his weight on his palms. They both know he won't ask again.

 

Kara goes from a stiff posture of crossed arms and a schooled expression, to turning away, leaning a hand onto the CIC table. She's blinking and taking deep breaths, taking a moment to remember that she should probably _say_ something, but Adama is still a step ahead of her.

"Don't feel like you're letting me down if you can't do this."

"Sir," she says, and it's not a confirmation or an answer. "If, um. If you have no objections, I would like to ask Lee to come with me as back-up...just in case...if—"

But she realizes he was probably about to suggest as much, from the look on his face, and there seems to be something about the way she said it that really surprises the old man. "Of course...He would be the most viable option of somebody to accompany you. I only wonder..."

"If he'll do it?" Kara's eyebrows lift up slowly. "If he'll do it for _me_."

Adama lets out a sigh. "It's between you and him. I can't be the one to ask."

Later that afternoon, then, Lee is clarifying, "Wait, you actually did ask me to come in here because you had something to talk to me about." She's just stopped him from untangling out of her bed sheets; this wasn't how she'd imagined it, but telling him while they're crammed into a bunk together seems as shitty a time as any. (And she really meant to ask him the second they were alone, but then she found herself pulling and touching, pressing a hand under his waistband, all in a sad and sudden way, as if she'd been missing it.)

Kara swallows, pushing her jaw out a little. The automatic attempts to get comfortable in the cramped area turn into her head lilting a little bit against his arm, and she's staring up at the bunk ceiling for gods know how long as she tries to sort out where the hell to start with something like this, and she needs to get it out before somebody starts pounding on the hatch.

"Hey," Lee says, a little too uncomfortable and confused to be necessarily soft with her, but not impatient either. "...What's going on?"

"I'm sorry I have to ask you this. I understand if you can't." She presses her lips together, and finally settles into sitting up, the sheet pulled up over her chest and staring straight forward.

"Ask me to do what?" he asks quietly, and she wishes, beyond any sense of what she would usually admit, in her clumsy and simple need for some comfort, that he would just say it, could say it and mean it, _Anything for you, you know that. What do you need?_

"...Help me assassinate Admiral Cain."

 

If someone had told him, six months ago, that it would eventually be possible for him to be angry at his _father_ on _Kara's_ behalf...

But he does know him at least well enough by now to know that he's got to be aware of how frakked up this is, it's got to be eating at him at least a little that he's putting it on somebody he cares about so much, he just doesn't understand...

"Do you even know, can you imagine, how hard it was for her to even spit it out when she came to me about this?" Lee is demanding as he stands over his father's desk. "I know, I guess, I'm...the best option, but there's got to be someone she trusts more, if you can pull some strings—"

"First of all," Adama says with a raise of his brows. "Who would you suggest?"

"I don't know, I haven't memorized all the tiers of her frakking social life, but with how many of us got moved to _Pegasus_, I'd think...The point is, you're already throwing this in her lap, and then you had to send her to _me_, to—?"

"You don't understand," he interrupts, comprehending Lee a little better now. "It was Kara's idea."

"...What?"

"She suggested you before I said anything about it. It was her idea."

Lee's mouth is hanging open for a couple seconds, and his composure sinks together almost instantly. And his next words are a stammered "I'll do it."

Whatever all of it means, he means it. He wants her to understand that he knows this is hard for her, that it's probably the toughest thing she'll ever have to do. He can't imagine saying it, so he accepts the mission, hoping she'll know, that in that small way that she'll let him and he'll let himself, they're in it together and he's there for her this once.

At the back of his mind, he's even strangely aware that he might do something like this if it meant she wouldn't have to.

He always had a pretty instinctive awareness of the protectiveness of everyone around him in these dire situations, but it was more just a supplement of something he'd felt towards other people his whole life; now, he doesn't know, he must be starting to understand it a little better than that. He remembers the gun fight against the cylons on Kobol, how he and Kara were finally able to put aside all the complications and just look out for each other in the heat of battle, how there was a certain companionship soldiers had to have for one another even if it was something sturdily manufactured. He may have a really hard time with her as a person, but he realizes now that if he was in her place, he'd want her at his side too. So he tells her he'll do it and he tells her nothing else, and he knows she'll understand, even if she thinks or assumes or knows that it's not really about her. They quietly shake on it.

The feel of her hand and how it lingers, just a little bit, just long enough for her thumb to rub against him as if it has a mind of its own: This is what he's thinking about when he has to punch out and when he's floating in the cold black, when he fails her and feels like he can't get back to where he's been.

 

The only time they even talk about it is the first idle moment Kara has a reason to hook a transport to Pegasus, when Lee is trying to catch a nap before a briefing. She climbs eagerly into his rack, straddles her thighs smoothly over him, sitting up as she removes both her tanks. His hands land automatically on her knees but don't do much else when she leans down to land some teasing nibbles on his shoulder, and it doesn't take her long to arch back off of him, a look of nonplussed boredom on her face.

It's not like he has to even say,_ I'm not in the mood_. He just gives her an apologetic shrug.

Kara sighs, leaning farther back and pushing a couple rogue bangs around on her forehead. "You need to let this go, Apollo."

Lee looks unaffected, rests his forearm across his forehead in aggravation. He's looking at her with a mix of disinterest and adoration, and in a half-decided second thought he pushes up to pull her into lying down. "Your opinion is noted," he mutters numbly, and then he starts kissing his way down her neck, chest, grazing his teeth against her ribs at the bare skin below her bra.

"—Stop," she demands with annoyance as it tickles her. As he sits up, over her now, and starts undoing her belt, she flatly says, "It's not your fault, what happened, why don't you get that? You need to shut that noise off in your head about what _almost_ happened, because we're both still alive..." His gestures are harsher now, tugging out of the buckle and pulling her pants down her hips. "And even if something had happened to me, so frakking _what_? I took the mission, it's my _job_. L— " She rolls her eyes at herself, pivots her hips up to get her pants farther off.

His motions have frozen, his eyes suddenly glaring down at her with tight frustration. He could make something out of the near-slip, but instead he demands, "And what about trusting each other?"

Kara rolls her eyes.

"Doesn't that mean a frakking thing? You _picked_ me for this mission, and I let you down—"

"Do you trust me?" Kara's expression has quite quickly gone to a perplexed, sort of patronizing fascination with him, and the question seems asked in pure curiosity.

He furrows his brow in hesitation, like he's never really considered the question before. But it doesn't take him long. He answers solidly, "Yes."

From where she's lying flat under him, Kara blinks, in realization of something. All she can give him is a pitying smile before she shakes her head once and says, "That's a mistake."

Because of the look on his face, the fact that he still doesn't move, she sighs and turns to slip out of the rack. But suddenly with an almost grudging nature in his desire he grabs a shoulder and pushes her back flat again, gets the curtain, grips her by her wrists, pinning her arms back above her and kissing her, hard. She can't shrug out of the feeling of it, gives in and competes with the fervor, as if it's all just a fight he needs to get out of his system.

 

\-----

 

Things get even worse.

One hour after Kara is the only one of three pilots to return from a Viper dive around an asteroid, Lee hears an uproar far down the hall closer to the bunk chambers, a loud thud as if someone is being angrily thrown to a wall. A couple people look over at his approach as if relieved that somebody with some authority is showing up, and he makes out the unintelligible shouting as none other than Starbuck in response to Kat's angry taunting. Before he knows it he's grabbing the closer pair of shoulders as the uproar turns too close to a real fight, barking at them to split it up, but Kara turns as if to lash out in a new direction and for some reason Lee grabs her shoulders again, tighter this time, and her eyes just blaze back all dangerous and pained.

"What. Are you drunk?" he demands quietly. And because he knows there's something more than what it looks like here, "What's going on?"

She smacks up on his forearms to get out of his grasp and slips off. More self-conscious now about the little throng of pilots still standing around watching, he just gives an exasperated shake of his head and resolves that he can probably only rile her up even worse if he tries to make something out of how much of a mess she looks like.

But he's barely started walking away when he hears a booming thud: one of her boots, shot just past him and bouncing off the wall treacherously close to his head. When he looks back at her she's terrible and severe and headed into the bunks, slamming the hatch behind her. And the look he gives everyone before he follows her in with the one boot is a mix of total confusion and _Don't anyone frakking come in here_, provoking a stream of shocked mutterings because it comes across like at least one of the two is going to come back out with a black eye.

And what he really is half-expecting from such a shook-up Kara is for her fist to go flying into his face the second the hatch shuts, is almost willing to have it out with her if it will get him any closer to understanding what the frak's going on. But he can't honestly say he's surprised when she goes for his belt instead.

"—Kara. Um."

"What?" she demands impatiently.

He looks up and down her, all the lines of grief in her face and the tension in her body and it's almost laughable and sour that she wants this right now. "I didn't come in here for that." She ignores him, and a second later he's insisting, "_Stop_ it."

"What the hell do you want, Apollo?" She's already shifting into the gear of indifference, backing off of him.

Lee stupidly holds out her boot a bit before just chucking it to the floor as she sits back on the table and shucks off the other. "Look, why don't you just tell me what's going on with you?"

A bitter snigger lets out of her before she says, coldly calm, "No. I didn't come in here for a conversation."

Lee tenses up even more, watching her get up to mess around with something in her locker.

Her next remark is all the more frustrating for not even being that roughly delivered. "Like you and I could ever have a conversation about how bad things get without...competing with each other."

"I don't know if it would kill us to try, you know." He's a little bitterly surprised that she would still be thinking he's like that, but maybe he's never given her enough of a reason to think otherwise.

After a moment, despite looking like she isn't listening to him, she does add, "Why don't you ask your old man, Apollo? I'm sure he'll tell you all about my stupid ass making promises we can't afford to keep." She shakes her head, now mumbling bitterly to herself in syllables he can't make out.

"What?" But then he thinks he knows what she's talking about and just says, "Oh."

"I left them to die," she insists, an undertone of why-am-I-bothering-even-saying-this-out-loud puncturing her words with exhaustion. She numbly adds, "I should've tried harder. I should've done something, I don't know."

"You did what you could," Lee says, not just speaking about that but of what happened today. He doesn't know why he's so surprised that somebody like Starbuck needs to hear something like this, but he knows it's coming through in his voice. "You give what you have. None of it's your fault."

She looks away, still brimming up with so much anxiety her breath is a bit loud. Abruptly, after they fall into a pause and she's just staring at the floor in front of her, she asks, "You sure you don't want to frak me?"

Somehow it seems intentionally disarming and he can't help a laugh of surprise, and after a moment replies, "Yes...Look, if you have to take the morning off, I'll see what I can do. Just get some rest. And that's an order, Thrace."

 

"It is my professional, and personal opinion," Lee says, finishing off the half-inch of drink in his father's quarters. The president slowly cocks an eyebrow at the admiral. "Kara Thrace is, as you've said many times, the greatest pilot we've got. But she's slipping, and she might keep slipping if she doesn't at least have the chance to do this."

Adama, supportive as ever of the president putting down her foot, lets out a barely audible sigh.

"Of course I understand why you turned her down, it's...an extremely dangerous rescue mission, and for a group of people who may or may not even be alive. But from being CAG I can tell you that a lot of our pilots are very much about principles, and just not bothering to save people we know are out there..."

"This would be very much off the record," Roslin interrupts, in a tone of slightly more conversational rapport. "But considering Thrace's determination, I was wondering...if during her time back on Caprica, she may have formed a particularly close relationship with one of the resistance fighters..."

Lee's brow goes furrowed, and he exchanges an uncomfortable look with his father, who seems hesitant for a different reason.

"Captain Thrace, and Lee, don't have the closest of relationships," Bill explains a little matter-of-factly. "You can't assume he'd have any idea if that were the case, and frankly I don't know if—"

"Honestly?" Lee intercedes. "I don't think the way she's been is just about one person. Sure, it's possible something like that happened with somebody, but...I don't want you to think her becoming lax on things is all just her having some kind of personal tantrum. My bet would be, she made a promise to somebody, and she's trying to keep it. She isn't...isn't like _that_."

"Like..." Laura slowly grapples for the word, "Emotional?" and Lee almost feels like she's having a joke at him.

"I don't know her very well," he replies, quickly aware of how uncomfortable this is getting.

"I agree, though," his father says, slowly conceding to Kara's defense. "Thrace is more aware of what's out there, and if she thinks this is something we need to do, that's where I'm willing to stand."

When Roslin speaks after a moment, she's back to being legislative. "I am not approving the mission, but I will...consider it, once again," she tiredly promises.

That's good news, and Lee maybe looks a bit too loosened up for a moment. He just nods respectfully, and thanks her, and when he's getting up to leave he swears that the president is giving him a curiously slanted look on his way out the door.

 

She goes from her low to a considerable high when the planning of the rescue mission is more than underway. Their chance meetings are even fewer than usual lately, and the first time she sees him while she's over on_ Pegasus _to brief the pilots, she's in a good mood, flippant and friendly while everyone around her is biting their nails over the election speeches.

"Hey," he mutters to her, a little distracted by what's on the radio in the rec room when she leans into the table next to him.

"Do I owe you a thanks?" she's asking. When his attention comes out of the stream of Baltar's lecturing and into what she just said, he just meets her eyes in a look much like the one she's giving him, surprised and amused and not quite aloof. He smiles.

"Hey, if I don't see you," he finally says, "Good luck out there."

Now the corner of her mouth threatens to smirk back at him. There's an almost uncomfortably long pause before she teases, "You worried about me?"

"I need every pilot I've got," he grants; even though he's not her CAG now and it's not quite an applicable comment, it seems a fitting joke between them. He's looking away from her again when he adds, "Especially you."

Something falls in Kara's expression, but not sadly. "Um. Thank you, sir," she finally quietly says.

 

\-----

 

Everything is just too much of a mess amidst the time frame in which the mission party successfully gets back: The election looks like Baltar, then it's Roslin, then it's frakking Baltar again, and Lee has been too distracted lately to really let it sink in that his living situation is about to change, a _lot_. And it's strange how he puts in only half of a shift thinking about it before he realizes what he wants to do.

It just so happens that the first person he tells is Dualla, because she's the first person to ask. Both crews are down on the planet helping to set up a few of the thousand things that need to be done within the first week of Baltar's presidency, and the flimsy table where he's catching lunch ends up occupied by only her after what he thought looked a little bit like an argument between her and Billy Keikeya.

Her fork pauses in the air, and then he can tell she's trying not to look so surprised. "Oh," she says, remembers to swallow. "Who's taking command?"

"I'd guess Taylor, unless Hoshi's sticking around." Lee gives his noodles a funny look. "Who do you think should do the job?"

She blinks, and he realizes before she replies that she's shocked he would ask for her opinion. He has to suppress a smirk at that.

He eventually says, "Anyway, it'll still be a couple months before anyone of the fleet is settling down here for good."

She asks, "Have you told your father yet?"

It actually takes him a month to go in and declare his intentions to his father, who isn't exactly surprised, but finds it curious. Lee understands why; it's not that he loves being up here, but it's probably hard for someone like his father to imagine what his aspirations are for down _there_. His only point of dreading it was a small amount of guilt for giving up his chances to really catch up with his dad, but it's not like they won't have any time for that at all. He can see the wheels turning, Bill wanting to ask if there's any particular reason for it, but instead he gives him a loose smile and a handshake, even a light hug around the shoulder.

"Like I said." Lee tells him, "I'll stay in command through the groundbreaking. To give you some leeway, and I can always help with—"

"Nah, stop. You know I've already got somebody lined up in case you decided to give it up."

"Oh?" Lee cocks an affectionate expression. "So eager to get rid of me?"

"You know that isn't the case," he says, but then jokes, "Not having Starbuck under my command, now. That'll be less of a headache."

Lee's smile takes on a more uncertain layer before he finally distractedly says, "Yeah."

 

Even though there would seem to be more respect and reason in starting the parties _after_ the ground-breaking ceremony, that doesn't seem to be the case with the throngs of civilians Lee weaves through at 0300 the night before it's supposed to take place. While he passes plenty of tents where it looks like people have shut in for the night, there are easily hundreds of people for only a few miles around who don't plan on getting any sleep.

For the most part he's just getting a look around, seeing what's being set up where and enjoying the cool night air, when he wanders out to the edges of one of the "neighborhoods" to something that is starting to look like a rough imitation of a park. One of the first things he sees is the quick movement of two people with a third straggling close by, in what he is impressed to realize is a sparse but functional reproduction of a pyramid court. Coming up closer, he picks up some humored dialogue between the two people having an informal match just as the ball goes bouncing out of bounds and is retrieved with casual agility by the third one who's only been watching. As the match resumes, both Lee and the spectator gravitate to sitting on a pile of lumber that makes for a good bench, and he nods at the other in greeting.

"How's it going?" The man is tall, his voice very companionable.

"Hey. This is, um. I hadn't seen this yet, this is great," Lee conversationally says, indicating the court. "I wonder if the Buccaneers built this."

The man laughs. "Yeah, well, that's us actually."

"Oh—" Lee laughs too, automatically sitting a little closer to extend a handshake. "Thing is, even if I could see you better, I wouldn't know. Haven't followed pyramid since I graduated."

"It's Sam," he says with a friendly grip. "T. Anders, if you didn't..."

"I have heard of you," Lee says, his voice taking on a more formal friendliness. "And a lot of the stuff you did on Caprica. Very admirable."

Sam seems a little surprised but humbly shrugs. "Well, we like staying alive." Lee realizes all at once that he hasn't introduced himself, but before he has a chance to say anything the other's attention is being caught by a person Lee now hears approaching in quiet pebbly footsteps.

"Nuh-uh." Sam shakes his head, looking far back over Lee's shoulder and shouting, "I'm not drinking that."

"It's not—No, come on. This stuff is fine."

Not knowing if it's a smirk or a grimace or what, Lee feels the corners of his mouth curling up slightly.

"That's what you said last time. That crap tasted like motor oil."

"And you'd know. Cause you hardcore resistance fighters drink motor oil for breakfast."

"Nah. But pro players do."

Lee can just imagine the eyebrows raising smartly when her smoothest of mocking tones delicately replies, "Guess that explains why they're all so _dumb_—"

"I heard that," one of the players on the court, a woman, is yelling while Kara just snickers, slams the bottle down on the lumber while blowing a stream of smoke out of her mouth.

"Where'd you get that one?" Sam is asking Kara.

"It's a secret," she says wryly. She offers him a drag of whatever it is she's smoking, and Sam shakes his head.

"You know I don't like it," he says.

That's when Kara realizes, in the dim profile from the nearest firelight, that Lee is sitting there. The half-lit impressions of their faces meet; Lee just smirks uncomfortably as she looks between the two men in vague dissatisfaction, and she has that half-terse look of adamant refusal to show much of anything at all in her expression. What she does is hold out the cigarette in a polite offer, not expecting him to take it; but he does, and takes a slow drag still looking at her, and gives it back.

"Sorry, this is...You know what, I don't think you—"

"I know who it is," Kara interrupts Sam flatly.

"Oh." To Lee he says, "You didn't say you were fleet..."

"This is Commander Adama," she informs. "I'm sure I've mentioned him a couple times. The admiral's brat? I'm his problem pilot?"

"Was," Lee says.

Kara takes an aloof second to concede, "Was."

With a simplifying shrug, Sam says, "So you two must know each other pretty well, I'm guessing?"

For a moment they're _both_ trying not to grimace, until Lee lets Kara off the hook with an open-ended, jokingly sarcastic "Yeah, Starbuck's a real blast" that has everyone snorting into short laughter.

After they all somehow manage small talk for a few more minutes, Sam is standing up to stretch out and Kara taps the bottle with her fingernail. "Drink that shit, you know how long it took me to find that?"

Sam just laughs.

"Come on. Chug it, Samantha."

"Oh, for—" Sam grabs her doggingly around the waist, dragging her along in a bullying grasp. "See how your attitude plays out when I kick your ass on this court—"

"No, no, stop," Kara squirms in protest, holding up her cigarette. "I gotta finish this."

"Ah, fine." The other players are nagging at Sam to join in, so it ends up with Lee and Kara sitting on the ground a little closer to the bonfire, next to each other but not _next_ to each other.

"For some reason it's weird to see you in your civi clothes," Kara remarks, her eyes fixed on the match.

"Yeah?" Lee looks over at her. "Same with you, I guess."

"...I've been hearing an interesting rumor, you know."

"Have you?"

"Yeah. Is it true?"

"Unfortunately for you? Possibly."

She laughs, a genuine little laugh.

They feel a bit separated from the match sitting alone out there, a wall of false privacy seeming to go up. When Kara speaks again, her question surprises him.

"What was that look on your face when Sam was complaining about the music from earlier?"

"...Oh." It takes him a moment to remember, and then he feels a little uncomfortable trying to explain it. "I just had this thought that he would've...gotten along with my brother pretty well..."

She looks over at him then for just a brief second. He thinks it's going to get really quiet again, but then she asks, "What was Zak like?"

He just gives her a slightly confused look.

"I mean, I know some things, but it's only your old man's side of the story, so I may not really have a good idea." She shrugs, and with a surprising lack of discomfort about it states, "I'm just curious."

He shifts up his knees, twitching a bit until he manages to sort out his reply. "Well..." He clears his throat.

"If you don't want to, you don't—"

"No, it's fine. Guess I just don't really know where to start." Lee's foot scrubs against the grass a little bit as he takes another half a minute. "He was...very into other people. Like his favorite thing to say was 'What about you?' Very good at figuring people out from the first minute he knew them. He had an obnoxious way of never looking out for himself, though. He felt a lot for other people, but..."

There is a long pause, in which Kara says nothing and doesn't look at him, but he can tell somehow she's not paying attention to the match anymore.

"It's way worse," Lee said, his voice going low, "that I let things slip off with him. I got fed up with my father. With Zak I just...felt guilty. It was hard to be around him when I couldn't get away from this awful feeling that I had everything he wanted, or deserved. Though of course now I start to wonder if I had all that wrong."

"What did he do after he busted his sims tests? Just leave the academy?..."

Lee lifts his brows and grins a little, reaches to smoke another drag. "He opened up a record store in Dionis."

Kara's eyes slowly grow into a humored astonishment. "Ah, wow. Old man must have been ecstatic about that."

"I can't believe you don't know this. Yeah, he turned a good profit too. I'd occasionally go visit there, and he'd tell me something to buy. He thought my taste in music was horrible, so..."

"What did he like?"

"Oh, everything. And I mean everything. Sometimes classical and opera, sometimes—stuff that just sounded like screaming..." His way of tapering off makes her laugh.

A moment later, more seriously, she comments, "Sometimes I wonder if that's the problem with you. Feeling for other people."

"...What?"

She's blinking hazily, rubbing a hand over her eyes before she goes on. "I think maybe you've got a lot of empathy in there somewhere. Not sympathy. Empathy. But when you've got something to grieve about, oh...You don't screw around."

There's a pause in which they both scoff, uncertain as to whether it's a bad time to laugh.

She's coming off almost maudlin in her long-trailing words, reminding Lee that she's smoked a little more than he has. "Like you just have to shut other people down for a while. Like, not even consider the fact that if I didn't lose anybody during the fall it just means I'd already lost them a long time ago. It's like you'd usually care more than most people do, but you just can't deal...At least, it's the best assumption I can make. I don't know."

He looks over at her, a bit somber. He finally asks, "What about you?"

"What?"

"What about your family? What happened?"

She inhales off the stub, puffs some out as she asks, "You want to finish this off?"

Sam comes hanging back and says something about somebody named Jean making some pancakes out at the bonfire, and Lee realizes he's invited in the same way that Kara realizes she'll probably look or feel like a jerk if he doesn't come.

This only turns mildly uncomfortable, him just watching everyone exchange jokes he doesn't understand, the way Kara will laugh at them hard enough for her forehead to sink onto Sam's shoulder. Even though he's not being left out, there's a tickling dry feeling like he's sinking into the corner even while he's sitting right there. He keeps catching little glances from Kara, and they look affectionately pitying, almost. Anders gooses her when she calls him "Samantha" again, and as Kara and Barolay start to really team up on making fun of something he said earlier, Lee is standing up to leave with a goodnight wave to everybody.

He's made it a few steps away when Kara is belatedly saying, "Hey, wait, I..." He turns just as she's tripping after him through the fire's rogue embers. "Forgot to ask you: Do you have any paper?"

"Paper?" The settled civilians have been trying to hit him up for all kinds of resources all day, but he's having a hard time imagining why she would have run out of paper already.

"Yeah, but thick...I'm making a new deck of cards."

He almost grins at that, either at the fact that she knows all the folds and rips in her own deck too well or that she's apparently _that_ bored. "I guess I could see what's in the Raptor..."

"Okay. If you find anything, just bring it to my place, it's...the third tent down from where they're collecting clothes, you know?"

"I think I can figure that out."

"One of the sides is kind of an...orangey fabric?" She cocks an eyebrow; everyone's still getting used to giving "directions" down here.

"See what I can do," he mutters.

He only realizes about half an hour later when he finds her sitting outside of the tent that she actually meant to meet him there, unless she only decided to leave the fire a few minutes before he found it. She stands when she sees him and goes inside, holding open the entrance so that he follows.

"I ripped the bottom layer off of every notepad I found."

"That's the stuff. Great." She's lighting a little camp lantern so that he can see a lot of belongings inside. Apparently proud of her work so far, she hands him all the cards she has completed with a bit of a smirk.

Lee picks out to closely examine one of the finished triad articles from the pile, squinting when he notices the perfectly colored shapes and the delicate flourish lines she added on the edges that you'd never find on an old deck from a corner store. Noticing a rubber-banded bunch of colored pencils on top of a mess of flimsier paper, he thinks it's strangely fitting what she's done with all the free time.

She's holding a blanket tightly around her, but as she starts to make up her bed for the night she takes it off and spreads it onto the mattress. It's a bare-bones excuse for a bed; when she hops lightly onto it, though, with her skin and hair a bleeding sunny vision in the firelight, bare feet and toes nimble and bare and homey and going tucked under the fleece, she makes it look deceivingly comfortable. Plush and inviting.

"You cold?" she asks, looking just up at him from where she sits. He clears his throat or does something else that's not knowing if he gets it, and she is smiling at him, tucking her hair back, and he's still a little stoned and it's a bellowing hot ache in his chest right now, how beautiful she looks.

He's standing close enough for her to just shimmy forward a little to reach up and loosen his jacket. Her eyes do something really sweet and scary as she's going for his waistline and starts to kiss along his stomach through his shirt. Lee feels a bunch of bronze-heavy butterflies flapping and slapping through his thoughts, and swallows.

"Nuh—Hold on," Lee protests. It all zips up rather quickly: "I'm not mustering out."

She stops then and slowly looks up, cynical. "Yeah, you _are_. You said so, everybody's been talking about it..."

"I never actually...Look, I changed my mind." He backs up a little, feeling short of breath. "It's strange enough that you're moving down. I figured if I don't have any good reason to settle here, it's the responsible thing."

She smiles, shaking her head. "Bullshit."

He challenges, "Okay. Name me even one reason I have to stay here."

She straightens out her face, looks down at her hands. "Okay, well..."

"...What?"

"I don't know," she says in a suddenly defensive tone, shrugging. "I don't know what I expected, it's just weird to me. I thought you were staying. Figured you'd finally want to...make some friends, get a frakking _life_. It's almost sad—"

"Sad?" he repeats, now defensive too.

"You know what I mean," she affirms, standing up now. She looks at him in a considering and disbelieving way for a long pause. "You're serious, aren't you?"

He knows he doesn't have to answer, and doesn't. She suddenly is very busy cleaning up in her tiny space, folding things away in unsteady movements when he turns out of his thoughts to look at her.

"Yes. I'm serious. And no more bullshit about it, okay: I was going to settle down, possibly because of you. Now I'm not. Because of you."

She says, "Right." Then suddenly, looking like she knows she's going to regret it, she says, "I'm not with Sam."

Lee smiles ruefully, as if she's in fact just confirmed something. "Maybe not exactly. You're not with me either."

She won't look at him.

"It's not like I'd have a real problem with it if you were," Lee says. "Just for the sake of giving something a real try. He seems like a great guy. You even seem to like this one."

"Oh, frak you," Kara grumbles; there's hardly any force behind it. She claws at her hair again, somewhat aggressive when she says, "If there's something you wanna ask me, why don't you just _ask_..."

His mouth opens and shuts in an unsteady, lost moment. He just shakes his head. "Do you even know for sure what's going to make you happy?" he finally asks.

For a very short, flaring moment, there's a look in her eyes like she wants to tell him he's completely missing the point. But after pressing her lips together for a second she gives an honest shrug, punctures the air with, "No."

She's run out of things to do with her hands, so she crosses her arms. This is suddenly a lot harder than he thought it was going to be.

"Look," Lee sighs, suddenly extremely aggravated, not understanding why she looks the way she's looking. Whatever he thought he would say is kind of interrupted by puzzled agitation, and he just says a bit loudly, slowly, "Is it really so hard for you to grasp that you just might be _consequential_ to me, enough for me to start being uncomfortable with the way this is?" He finishes with some gesture indicating between them.

She is actually closer to dead serious rather than flippant when she flatly says, "That could mean about a thousand different frakking things."

After a moment of looking straight at her, he manages frank clarity. "If I've learned one thing about you in the past few months, it's that regardless of what you do or don't want from me, you're completely stuck to the idea that _you_ are only good for an occasional frak. I don't know if it's just something about me, or something about you. But I should have walked away from all of it a long time ago."

It's strange, how it's just over then, over already. Kara walks around Lee's shoulder and grips hard to open the tent curtain, stealing outside, showing him out. He follows suit, and when they're outside among the small party crowds there's apparently nothing for her to really do except say, "Thanks for the paper."

"Yeah." Lee looks down, lets a breath out. "Good luck, Thrace." He doesn't wait, he doesn't linger, just turns and walks.

He runs into Samuel Anders after the ceremony way later when they both happen to be waiting for a resource shipment to show up, Sam wearing a skinned knee that needs to be iced. They haven't said anything to each other, but with nobody else around who either of them know the silence apparently becomes too much for Sam.

"You know," he starts comfortably, "I was gonna ask you what you did to piss off Kara so bad, but you don't look so great yourself."

The bullshit is almost out of his mouth, something like _I always piss off Kara, and I'm fine, I'm just tired_. But he realizes that he's kind of intangibly angry about everything himself, especially right that second, and maybe he does look like it. He's thinking Anders would see right through it anyway.

So Lee says, "I don't know her very well, you know," wondering if he will ever be able to feel like it's actually true.

Sam just nods, and as if Lee said something else entirely, gives a kind of sympathetic "Yeah..."

When the drinks come in, Lee grabs an entire bottle of the questionable suggestion of wine that at least comes in a real bottle, determined to find _someone_ to drink it with him by the end of the evening. He wonders if Dualla has any plans. Before he walks off though, he surprises himself by veering back to where Sam Anders is standing, his expression frank.

"You gonna take care of her?" is all he asks.

"She's one of the few I've got, Commander," he replies. "What the hell do you think I'm gonna do?"

Lee lingers just another few seconds, long enough to reconsider and simply add, "...Don't tell her I said that, okay?"

 

Dualla is surprisingly frank in how she flirts once she realizes they'll still be serving together after all. They start with a casual but romantic dinner and spread out the best excuses for dates that can be managed on a starship over the course of their first month running _Pegasus_ together. There is something very gradual and polite about the courtship of it; the way she kisses is softly ordinary. It reminds him of a sock peeling off. A pull and a give, but nothing new.

He's comfortable.

She is too, until the day she's hanging out on his bed waiting for him to change so they can go to the gym, and he hollers out of the bathroom, "Could you check if I have an extra pair of socks somewhere in that duffel? Under the bed?"

There's a long silence after that.

"Take that as a no?"

"Still looking."

"Oh."

When he comes out, flipping off the bathroom light, he immediately wonders if something's wrong.

"Dee?..."

Then she holds up what he remembers now he had wadded in the side pocket, and all he can do is let out a short laugh to cover the grimace.

"This is Starbuck's old hat." It's not a question; Kara used to wear that sports cap all the time. Practically the entire crew could identify the exact frays, the stain on the brim. He found it wedged deep between the mattress and the side of the bunk wall when he was moving after promotion.

"...I guess I forgot to give that back to her."

"Why do you have it?" Dee asks with a little bit of a laugh in her voice. When he hesitates for even a second, her head is already tilted in disbelief.

There are about a hundred perfectly convincing lies he could tell, and it's not like the truth is _necessarily_ her business at this point. But at the end of the day Lee is still a straight-laced noble bastard, so he opens his mouth, and only half a minute later Dualla looks like she wants to run for the door.

"Wait, wait, wait..." They're both sort of overwhelmed and nervously laughing about it in the next few seconds of shifting and stuttering. "Why does this matter? You don't actually think less of me because—?"

"No. No, no." She shakes her head. "It's not like..._I_ don't even dislike her, you know, she's got her issues, but...she's ours and everyone knows her like that. I...It's _you_ that..."

"What?"

"You two _hate_ each other," she points out, not like she still believes it, but like it's in some rule book somewhere.

Lee smiles uncomfortably. "...That's not entirely true."

"Yeah. Evidently."

"But I'm telling you, it's over, it's been over."

"I don't want this to matter. It almost doesn't matter," she clarifies. "But...You and I are going to be spending a lot of time around each other, and I'd like for you to be really honest with me and...I don't know if it's going to be that way if you and I are..."

He lets out a long sigh, can't help a slightly gobsmacked glance back to the hat sitting on his bed right now. "I just _was_ honest with you," he says almost helplessly.

She steps a bit closer, biting her bottom lip, and slowly emphasizes, "It's just too strange to mean nothing. You know?" She gives him a last kiss on the cheek as he can only fall speechless.

That is more of less how Lee manages to make his first real _friend_ since joining his father's crew.

 

\-----

 

Almost ten months after Lee last spoke to Kara, he comes hesitantly swaggering out on the hangar deck after a Raptor touches quickly down. He doesn't wait many seconds after the door starts hissing open to shout, "So you think you can just take a Rap for a spin up here whenever you feel like it? On civilian status, to boot."

That last remark is spoken in response to the jarring image of her stepping out after piloting a ship dressed in a sleeveless top and jeans, the long ropey layers of white-blond hair also catching him.

"What are you gonna do, Apollo? Toss me in hack for old time's sake?"

Having established with the tone of these comments that there isn't any tension between them from the last day they saw each other, their eyes finally meet as Kara holds her stance inside the Raptor, looking down somewhat hesitantly. The full sight of each other immediately alters the mood, and Lee just puts on a matter-of-fact smile, says, "Hi."

She replies, "Hi," in a kind of agreement. She inches quickly down the ramp, Lee automatically helping her down by the arm.

Once her feet hit the floor he gets to asking, "So what brings you to my ship today?" With a closer look at her he can already detect maybe something's amiss; her smile isn't quite a smile. She hesitates to answer. "It's okay. I'm used to everyone wanting or needing something."

"Must be why you don't come down on the surface ever."

He shrugs. "I don't _avoid_ it. I've been down a couple times, just...didn't run into you." In truth, only one time.

Surprisingly straightforward, she shrugs and declares, "Well, I need a favor."

"...Okay."

They're walking out into the corridor when she asks, "Do you remember Anders?"

He looks over with a cocked brow. "Samantha." When she doesn't laugh, he begins to understand what she's probably about to say.

"He's really..._really_ sick," she finally explains, biting her lip for a second. She has a slip of paper with something written on it. "Tigh said something about how you might have some back-up medical supplies for your pilots. I hate to just ask you for things, but..."

She trails off in slight surprise as he gives a pointing motion for her to hand him the paper. "Is that what you need?"

She gives it over, and he reads off the specific prescription, nods.

"I'll go see what we have. They're easy to get to, but it can take forever to find the right one...I need to be on the bridge soon, why don't you meet me there?"

She has a small look of surprised relief. "Okay. Thanks."

He's only gotten into the storage once, because Sharon Agathon needed something, and even then he had his reservations about just skimming off the supplies when he practically didn't know chamala from aspirin, didn't know what was rare, what was likely to be virtually impossible to resupply later on. But he decides ignorance is bliss, resolves to be grateful for the fact that there are two other bottles like the one he takes.

He's squinting closer at the label when the red alert makes him almost drop the bottle, and he barely registers through the jump in his nerves that Dee is on the comm and might as well be directly telling him to get his ass to the bridge, because there is only one reason he can think of and he wants to swear it_ can't_ be that...

Kara is standing in front of the dradis screen in the same stunned silence as Dualla when Lee skids through the bridge entrance. Dee jumps into motion when she sees him.

"Cylons."

When he runs up to get a look himself, there are a couple seconds where all he can do is groan a short "_Gods_."

But Kara has been zeroing in on one thing only ever since he came onto the bridge, and that thing is the small bottle of pills he forgets he is holding until she comes up and snatches it out of his hand. She goes running, and as Lee's hand halts in the air on its way to the phone, Dee takes a second to exclaim, "Is she doing what I think she's doing?"

Even more red blips are coming up on dradis, the red alert blaring in a constant whine and he only hesitates for a second before telling Dee, "You have the con."

"Wait, _wait_—" Dee's wide-eyed, demanding, "We need to—"

"Do what you have to do!" he shouts back. Once he turns out into the corridors he's absolutely sprinting, heading for the hangar bay, already starting to shout, "_Starbuck_!"

It isn't long until he catches up to her, sees that she's somehow wrested a sidearm off of one of the officers and is running about as fast as he is.

"_Kara_!" he roars, and she's turning into the deck now with him almost at her heels. He tries to snatch at her arm but doesn't quite stop her. "What the frak are you _doing_, are you _crazy_!?"

Kara just looks back with her expression all flaring with an accusation of how well he has to know exactly what she's doing, and of course he does. He knows. This is her, this is who she's always been, the woman who pulled a hell of a fast one to save his life the day she met him when all she knew him as was his father's son and hasn't proven to be an inch saner since then: How many times, after all, has he been wound up to a spitting wreck with how crazy and _stupid_ she is?...

This time he gets her forearm in a tight desperate grasp. "Look, think about this, you _can't_. You'll be lucky if you even make it down there before they blow you out of the sky—"

"Well, I'm trying, and you're going to let me, or I swear to gods I'll jump right out of this hangar deck and you—"

"You can't just—" She wriggles her arm out of his grip.

"For _frak's_ sake!" she yells, backing off like she's had enough. Even louder she snaps, "For once just get off my back!—"

And almost matter-of-factly, as if she's just very calmly suggested he try to stop a gods damned earthquake, he's shouting, "I _can't_."

He doesn't realize how much it sounds like an admission until she turns around from avoiding and running from his glance and he sees her expression, all angry and stinging and sad at the same time. With only a slight pause beforehand she's taking a few grinding steps forward and over to him. Her hand is behind his neck, at his cheek and his jaw and she's kissing him, full and flat and a sad declaration. It's only long enough for him to teeter off balance and fall into holding her loosely; when she pulls away her face is set back together into the one he knows better, and her voice is cool and a little cold even when her mouth is still almost touching his.

"Goodbye, Apollo."

And then she's tearing away and running back into the Raptor, and he can't believe he's really ordering the exit clearance, barely recognizes his own voice or the shakiness in his hands for the next blur of minutes in which he hears Dualla on the open comm announcing thirty seconds to the jump. The ships tear off in their rubbery pluck across the galaxy, and when Dee is handing the comm phone over to Lee he realizes in a sick rush that he's going to have to somehow explain to his father that he just let her go.

When he picks up all of his thoughts are screaming and stammering too loudly, and the first thing he can manage to say to the admiral is, "We need to go back."

 

\-----

 

Lee is nudged awake by Dee, squints up at her and immediately asks, "How long was I out?"

"Six or seven hours." She shrugs. "You needed it. Hey, when was the last time you ate anything?"

Lee's head thunks back against the back of the futon where he fell asleep, and his eyes travel down to get his bearings on what he was doing before. It takes him a moment to remember he was asked something. "Um. I don't remember. Has my dad called up about—"

"The meeting is still on. They're coming over to _Pegasus_." Dee's body seems to tense from where she has her hands wrapped around a warm drink. She sets it on the glass table in front of them.

Lee sits up and goes over the transcripts of messages they looped back from a recent risky Raptor run close to New Caprica, tapping a pencil against it until he drops it down, combing his hand up to rub his heel against his sore eyes. He's gone over it a hundred times now, and he's in the same snag as the admiral: They've got no element of surprise, no shock and awe, if they don't—

"You know," Dee finally says, jarring him out of his thoughts. "There was a time you always valued my input on things..."

"I still do. I mean...I value it." Lee gives a self-explanatory gesture. "But this is different. I'm finding it harder to ask."

"Lee," she says, serious and staring forward instead of at him. Her head shakes a little, almost furiously. "We are going to die if we attempt this rescue. You realize that, right?"

"Dee, we're not going to die." He looks at her and the brewing of her inner thoughts for a moment. He repeats, "We're not."

"Between you and your father, I just wonder..."

She trails off with a little noise of hesitance, and a defensive edge crawls into his mind.

"You've lost your head, Commander." She's both personal and terse in how she says it. "You don't have the perspective on things you once did. And we both know why."

He shrugs, starting to feel a couple cold words creeping up, but he simply says, "It doesn't matter what reasons we have to get them back. As long as we get them back."

She considers with a rougher look on her face; he can see her hands are almost clenching into fists as she tries to bite something down.

"Dee. Just say it."

She daringly, impatiently simplifies, "She was just a woman you were sleeping with."

Dee is bravely bracing for some backlash, but Lee can't muster more than frustration about it. He evenly replies, "Do you have any idea how many times I've tried to convince myself that it's really that simple?"

It's like there's something, too much fervor in the room that Dee is almost scared of. Very quietly she says, "You're losing it, Lee."

"What do you want me to do?" he demands. "Let my dad go into this with just his crew...Just dance out into space and survive? Frak around with you and everybody else on this ship and keep breathing like it even _matters_ to me when everyone else is..."

But Dee is just shaking her head again, eyes flaring.

"I don't know what to say to you, okay. I'm not like you, I can't just forget about everything, is that what you want me to do? Like you forgot about Billy?...I just can't."

When he looks at her he's abruptly aware that he's hit a very bad nerve. "Hey, I didn't mean..._Dee_." She's already on her way out of his quarters. "Dee, I'm sorry—"

The hatch slams behind her, leaving him to bite out a curse at the mug she left on the table.

 

That time, one time: They were in his bunk during one of the last few days when he'd become more insistent and less _there_ at the same time, sleeping with her like he needed to get it over with and never any more extending any disguise about what she might have been doing to him the whole time.

They hadn't bothered jamming the hatch. Right in the middle, two pilots came stomping in. Lucky and Grape arguing about something they couldn't find, sifting, searching in their bunks. With a stiff impatience Kara had halted her motions under him; but in the act of waiting in controlled silence for a few seconds, Lee adopted a suddenly insistent look in his eyes, moved to grasp up her leg.

With a curving silent grace, he hoisted her body into a hug of a knot against him, continuing in controlled motions, the kids bickering just above the half-whispers of noise they made as he took her fervently, possessively, hijacking the moment into his control. It was strangely stifling with the two out there and them in here; being stuck with each other in a baited silence, it was the most alone they'd ever been, because Kara was somehow powerless this way, confined to her body, her lips, the things he was doing to them. When her breath hitched too loudly, he bit at her bottom lip, but then after her silence his lingering mouth moved at hers far too sweetly, too dearly.

On the other side of the curtain, one grunted in aggravation. The other said, "We'll have to tell him we lost it yesterday" and the noise was nothing but a static barrier. Kara couldn't make a single noise against Lee and she couldn't get out, the anxious tingle of her instincts fighting against it in vain; there was only the precisely focused blue color of his eyes as she was trapped looking at him looking at her, their caged breaths butterflying under their chests, and how good it felt. Within the last moment before the cadets left the room, he was trembling uncontrollably and biting his teeth at her shoulder to keep it in. Even with her release building to slam moaning loudly out of her as the hatch finally closed behind them, she did wish, for one second, that it had gone on a little bit longer.

 

Kara wakes up to dark early morning. As the coarseness of her surroundings roars into her recollection, she rolls up off the couch and immediately sets herself pacing around the room as if she can painlessly walk right out of the dream and just forget, forget it, do something else, but it's too late.

Every single day that goes by further confirms to Kara that she is never getting out of here. Out there people are suffering but suffering with others; she is alone in her alien, unusual pain, in the gradual breaking down of her will to fight back. She hasn't seen anybody; she doesn't know who's alive and who's dead. It makes her feel like she is buried far underground, and even if there's a resistance going on, even if there's a way out, even if—one hell of an 'if'—anyone is ever coming back for them, she feels on some days like no one would find her in here no matter how loud she screamed.

Her pacing has brought her into the kitchen, opening drawer after drawer for any sharp object she can find, because she's not going to get any more sleep and neither is the man who is not a man in the next room. Right now she wants to cut her own brain out for being so cruel: For the last two months she has managed to feel so little, to want nothing, to not want to want anything. And then suddenly in the blackness of this frakking wicked joke of a home her body kicks up in her the memory of the farthest possible thing from her, quickening her breath and softening her body to the floodgates of starving loneliness. She finds a butter knife and wields it into a fist. If her dreams are going to kill her, well, he''ll just have to die in his sleep too.

The ones who really care are gone, the ships straying into oblivion, and for all she knows Sam is dead by now. No one to come looking for her, no one who's been told a good reason that they should. Something is coughing up, an insistent wail of a thought in the back of her mind, about the mere seconds in her life she was living for, and how many more of those times she might have had. The things and the people and the time she might not have wasted, if only some somehow wonderful son of a bitch had asked her a different question.

She tries to tell herself it doesn't matter now. All the truth that she refused is the same as the violent vengeance she throws onto her captor again and again. No matter how many of his dead bodies she can pile up in defiance, it doesn't change the fact that nobody is coming back for her.

 

\-----

 

He manages to stop thinking about her. He makes himself do it because he knows his head is on straighter when she's not zigzagging through it, he does it so that he won't screw up and so they can carry out this mission like they know what they're doing and so she and all the other survivors will get their asses off Baltar's precious rock and back on a solid ship.

He doesn't think about her until _Pegasus_ is flying its ambush path right into a basestar and he's back on _Galactica_ and despite the hordes of crowds of refugees cramping up the ship, the walls are just singing out waiting to feel like home to him again, and it doesn't yet, because he doesn't know if she's dead.

Trying to merge throughout the ocean of elbows to actually look for someone in particular is practically impossible; he hasn't even gotten a chance to say anything to his father when he's waylaid by a crying woman holding a child who is suddenly overcome and gripping his sleeve and fumbling out a mantra of "Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming for us," and he doesn't know what to say.

That's when he sees Kara.

She's about a dozen feet off, a flat vision among the dots of dirty and tired people, and he doesn't know what the hell he imagined he'd do when he found her, but all he can do is stay rooted to the spot, and look at her. Her arms are crossed tightly against herself and there's something uncertain and lost in her eyes, as if there's nowhere for her to go. But he can hardly focus on how she looks. It's almost frightening, in that moment, how very huge the very fact of her standing there happens to be for him.

It could be seconds later, maybe it's minutes, when she's looking around enough to notice him and gradually meets his eyes, more like he's some horizon in the distance than a person.

It takes her half a moment to react, and when she does, she doesn't exactly brighten up. But there's a very sad hope there, and she almost imperceptibly seems to stand up a bit straighter, eyes just a bit more lively, almost as if it's to show a measure of sturdy respect. It's as if she's saying, _I'm still here_.

And he looks at her.

It's not the loud and visceral reunion he thought he would've wanted; it's not much of a reunion in the first place.

But it's enough.

 

When he catches only bent-up rumors of what happened to her during those months, he can only shut off and not let it wash into him, waiting for some opportunity to really know for sure what's true. The hard part is not knowing whether she's avoiding talking to him, or whether it should be the reverse, or both. She starts busting up landings like her head's completely gone, and all he can do is march up to her afterwards with that old anger on fire, calming himself down enough to force his voice to a level only she can hear.

"What the frak is wrong with you?" he demands frantically, not looking directly at her as if he needs to be candid about it in front of the couple snooping knuckle-draggers.

Her eyes are on the floor for several seconds before she looks up at him, and the look is so pathetic and sorry, he resents it. "I don't know," she mutters.

"I can't just cover your ass, you know," he grumbles, but he knows there's too much concern in his eyes for her to miss it.

 

Samuel Anders survived. He catches some ride to _Galactica_ and Kara apparently isn't pressed to see him anywhere more private than the mess hall just after she's nibbled down some food, with Lee just happening to be a couple tables away. He does a decent job blocking out their conversation, but when he looks over she's giving Sam that apologetic look, like whatever he's asking or saying the answer is no and she can't articulate why. There is no apparent lack of warmth between them, but they look completely worn out, and it's definitely nothing as simple as a catching up over lunch.

Lee is still trying to look absorbed in his own business, manages to not realize Kara's getting up and leaving the room without Anders in tow until he sees her heading out the door.

"Adama."

Lee fidgets and turns a slow, confused look over in Sam's direction.

"Let's get a drink."

He's trying to think what to say, but his head is already nodding on its own accord anyway.

 

They've moved from weaker drinks to shots after Sam apparently needed to get a bit more glazed before he could explain in any detail what that sick frak of a cylon was keeping Kara cooped up for.

"Doesn't make any sense to me either, man," he's saying as he rubs at his face. "Doesn't make sense to her. They're all so frakking twisted I didn't think anything could shock me anymore, but..."

There are other sick thoughts and questions about it welling in Lee's mind, but he can't bring himself to ask and wonders if it's possible Sam hasn't been able to ask either. Lee has felt all kinds of worried over Kara before; "protective" is something new. It's an intangible urge over someone like her, and Sam almost seems to be reading his mind with what he says next.

"Remember when you asked me to take care of her?"

A tired, bitter grunt is Lee's only response.

"That girl. I swear, I tried, you know. I'm sorry if I—frakking—_failed_ in that or whatever, but..."

Lee tries to reassuringly shake his head.

"No, it's just. I'm asking you now. Even though we both know you can't, probably nobody can, I'm asking you to try."

Lee's brows slowly go lower. He's drunk enough to ask, "Were you with her?"

Anders just gives a little dreary laugh. "I'm sure you've heard it all by now, Commander, but you really wouldn't ask if you knew what it was like on that planet. Not just during the occupation, it was an ugly place...Ask me if I'm in love with her, I might punch you in the mouth or something. We were close. We were really close, and that's all you can call it."

Lee almost smirks. "Are you in love with her?"

He didn't say it because he didn't believe him; but Sam just laughs again. "Frakkin' Apollo...Listen. She means the world to me. She's one of the greatest friends I've got; I don't have any regrets. I'm sure you've got lots of people you work with and it's pretty intense and you're really close to them, and I'm not saying...I'm not trying to say it's not as much, it's just not the same. It's different."

"Actually..." Lee is frowning at the glass in front of him, eyes troubled and kind of wistful. He sighs and admits, "I really don't have that many friends."

A couple minutes after giving Lee this look like that's about the saddest thing he's ever heard, Anders is slapping his comm extension number onto the table in front of Lee, finishing off his last shot and getting up to leave.

 

He finds his father's office unlocked but apparently empty, mostly dark inside. After a hesitation he wonders why the mostly ineffectual lamp on the desk was left on and goes inside to switch it off. He's made it to the desk when he hears "He's on Colonial One for the next hour."

He jumps a bit and looks over to the cozy worn couch where he makes out the partly shadowed blond figure. For some reason he clicks the lamp to the lower setting before he goes slowly over. Her demeanor seems calm and indifferent; he hesitates but then sits down next to her.

She belatedly adds, "Knowing him, maybe longer."

"What, are you just waiting for him?" he quietly asks.

"I'm expected to have reported here when he gets back," Kara explains. It doesn't explain why she's early, but he finds it easy to imagine she just needed to get away from some things. His father's quarters are admittedly a good kind of refuge, and even though Bill wouldn't be too happy about them just hanging out in here, he finds himself very tempted to stay. He's about to ask if she wants him to leave, but she adds a flat comment, "I guess he's pretty pissed off at me."

There's a bottle sitting on the table that was probably there when she walked in. He grabs a couple glasses off the little side table and pours them both a small amount. She's belated in leaning forward to pick hers up, and even then just holds it, motionless.

"He's frustrated," Lee says in a way of reassurance. "He knows you went through some bad stuff, though. I'm sure the smoke will clear up in a while."

Kara finally takes a sip after he does. She's shaking her head after she swallows. "I don't think so. He's been fed up with me before, but...I think it's different this time."

"Don't worry about it, okay? He's just. He's just being an asshole, but he can't be pissed at you forever. We both know he's forgiven me before for being a much bigger pain in the ass than you, so..."

"Yeah, but," she mutters, "you're his son."

He looks at her directly. She won't meet his eyes through the dimness, but he doesn't waver. "You're practically his too, anyway."

"It's nice to think so," she replies with a terse raising of brows.

He lets out a sigh, a _Don't be that way_ look on his face. But she gives a resistant motion, like she's numbly resigned and can't put up with him weakening it.

She takes another sip and then is holding the glass in one hand, her other lingering at her mouth, at what she's about to say. He feels the impending weight of it somehow before she speaks.

"You know..." She seems to take a breath before she says, "I've never had much luck with family."

Some aching understanding twists into his chest, and while he would've tried to put these revelations about her out of his mind in the past, he just lets it sink far, far in, until he feels desperate to erase it from both of them. It means so many things about her at once, but mostly Lee is realizing and remembering how so much of the problem with them started with trying to punish each other, Lee dropping it at some point almost without realizing while Kara was seemingly never going to stop even after she forgot why she had to do it.

"Don't do that," he finally weakly says.

"Don't do what?" she says with an attempt at a laugh, but it's more incredulous-sounding than defensive.

"Look, I spent the last three months being a pain in everyone's ass, letting Dad be a pain in mine when I got off my game, thinking about frak-all except for how we were going to get you back. No, let me finish," he has to cut her off. "I know it's not much of a comfort, after going through that hell, knowing that somebody was waiting for you to come back, cause it doesn't fix anything, does it? But we both had to get you, and I don't know if it's family or what it is, but he needs you to be okay. So of course he's going to be pissed off at you when you get back and after all that, you're seemingly not even living."

She is still frowning, but she turns a different kind of somberness on him with a sidelong look. "You angry too?"

"Not with you. No," he cuts off with a little bitter scoff. "No, I'm pissed, because neither of us were naive enough to really expect New Caprica was going to be anything but a temporary reprieve, if much of that at all, but...I mean, something was different. And we had that much, and I frakked it up...A year ago, when we were down there..."

Something starts to tense just a little all over her body, and he just has to hope not in a bad way, has to keep launching in. He feels like he's running out of steam, though, so his next statement is simple, raw.

"I asked you the wrong question."

Kara presses her lips together. She swallows, and asks, "What do you want to ask me now?"

He slowly reaches over and takes the glass out of her hold and sets it on the table. He foolishly thinks about holding her hand before he knows not to, diverts the soft purpose of that into what he says. "Are you okay?"

Kara gradually breathes in deep and lets it out, not seeming to move an inch except for where the corners of her mouth are smiling in the same sad hope he saw in her when she first got back, but with more of an inertia, a prelude to something.

She doesn't look him in the eye, and she doesn't answer the question; instead, in a statement and a question and a scared declaration, she says, "Lee..."

And before he can start to wonder who the frak this woman is and how and when she became the big neon blaring meaning of everything good in his life, he's bringing her mouth into his with a gentle grasp at her cheeks, kissing and holding and drinking her in, just thanking the frakking gods that she kisses back and even more firmly, longingly.

She lets out one long sigh as he opens and deepens it, too insane to be slow about it, a hand already roaming from its place on the couch to hint between her thighs. She breaks off, just enough to plead, "Come here."

"I—" He's panting a little, tries to gesture as if to remind her where they are, but he already knows he gives about as much of a damn as she does. "Do we—"

"Get the—"

"—Yeah." He brushes his lips at hers just shortly, gets up.

When he comes back from locking the hatch, she seems to be uncertainly contemplating the couch, all too much in a fervent daze to really care. He reaches down and shoves the glass table away a bit and then he's down on his knees in front of her seated body, pulling her down. Her arms wrap up around him, her breath sounding eager when their laps collide in a rhythm as he's easing her down onto the floor.

At some point he pauses long enough to just squeeze her to him, overcome momentarily by how she's clawing at his shirt, breathing almost like she's going to cry. He's hugging her and kissing slow along her neck like she always seemed to like, and there's a terrible pang in his chest when he gets to her ear and mutters, "Did he hurt you?"

"...Not like that." She makes a bit of a gulping sound, running a hand through his hair. "Not like that."

He feels like there's still a hesitation, and he doesn't know what to say, but then she's saying, "Come on," so he comes on and slips them around for undoing and shucking off their clothes, feeling a solid familiarity in the thumping of arms and legs against the hardness of the floor, but it's also new and shockingly soft and _Gods_—

"_Kara_," he gasps, when her knuckle's teasing down his placket before she wrangles him out; he has the presence of mind to wriggle out of his last layer when she insistently shoves up at his bottom tank. The slight roughness and the demanding is so familiar that it's jarring—frakking beautifully alarming—when he keeps looking at her and seeing something in her expression that's so sad but also culminating, so much more focused on him rather than the act than he was ever used to. His nerves spin up into a sudden need that makes him rear up off his back and grab her down for an urgent, long-lingering, gradually slowing kiss.

When her lips leave his her hips are already lining up around him, and a couple seconds later they both open their mouths and still in that first silent gasp. She bites her lip and holds it, just feeling, until she finally starts slowly moving and they stretch into the twin echoes of short groans.

She seems to let the moment pull her in a way so much more soft and instinctual than she normally lets herself be, and he watches the flexing and pulsing and breathing of her, all languid over the soaring feeling in the air. They can't take their time too much, though, and after dropping forward to kiss along his neck and collarbone, she rocks a few movements into him and then sharply collapses through a long gasp, ending on a note that is his first name again, still a sweet and new sound from her tongue that makes him lose his mind a little bit; and when he hears it now he moves up, re-situates above her. She lulls him through it and when he falls and falls, weakens to pieces all over her she's nestling into his neck and shoulder and suddenly muttering, "Missed you. I missed you."

His mouth that's trapped down over her collarbone just starts slowly grinning.

"So, um."

"I missed you too," he breathes out, still overwhelmed, recovering.

"I just wanted to ask, if we could do this again...like really soon," she goes on, now in a more panting tone like his. Maybe because she's actually not sure what he'll say.

A tiny noise escapes her as he rearranges himself off of her, separating from her. But he answers by leaning over and kissing her with pointed eagerness, so the next sound is a somewhat amused-sounding hum.

And then the next thing she says is: "Scissors."

 

Admiral Adama still has the same pair of old-fashioned hair shears Lee can vaguely remember him owning when he was five years old, and it ordinarily crowns the top of his medicine cabinet. Kara runs water over her hair in the sink once she's mostly dressed again; she watches closely in the mirror as Lee smoothes all the blond tresses into enough order to chop them up to a decently even length.

"Shorter?" He laughs when she looks dissatisfied.

Mock-accusing, she mutters, "You like it long. Don't you?"

In the mirror she can see something, vulnerability and affection, momentarily distracting him from answering. "I'll do it shorter."

Bill arrives just as they're done cleaning her hair off the bathroom floor; he only sees Lee standing out closer to the entrance and is about to ask what's going on. Then Kara appears, clearing her throat and standing up straight and going up to his desk all reporting-for-duty and business. And maybe it's the imploring look that Lee very shortly gives his father, maybe it's the fact that she cut her hair, maybe it's something about the three of them being in one room together, but something is disarmed enough for him to walk up behind his desk, sighing, and just say, "Why don't you have a seat."

A second later Lee realizes he's getting a questioning look. He simply explains, "It can wait. I'll come back in an hour."

But as soon as she can find him afterward, he makes love to Kara again slowly and playfully under the blanket in his bunk, and he can't remember the last time he lost track of time, but he's late to meet his father, and for whatever reason the old man doesn't seem to mind.

 

They don't return to the loosening-boots routine; even when they were still using that signal they didn't really need it. It is mostly never exactly planned now; they just happen to find themselves alone somewhere, some days, and Kara makes a joke at Lee a second before she's pulling over and wrapping herself around him. He gets the worst of her teasing in the same moments she's looking so crazy about him it sends a pleasantly uneasy shock down his spine. She is tyrannical and greedy in her affection and it's different from any comfortable relationship he's ever bothered with. And he doesn't know why he ever told himself he didn't want it.

He swears she gets more gorgeous every day, and the whole thing feels like a long seasonal blooming in slow motion, the way he remembers with an intense ache the feel of knowing she was probably dead for so long, the way he has become inhuman in his understanding that he can't take anything for granted any more. After so many cleaner, simpler relationships of his life in the time before the fall, here amid the atrocities and the starving and the suffering, he scrabbles to give her what she'll let him give and wonders if this is him actually floating along the bright apex of his life. He thinks he's starting to understand how the Agathons look at each other, like they've seen everything they could ever need to see. He hopes on some planet out there there will be pollination, coloration, the phases of leaves falling, but more and more of her mouth and it doesn't matter if there isn't. He feels young and old and withering, and golden, and good.

Most of the time she's not any easier. She still has a look in her eyes like a disembodied part of her is running for the door whenever he's around; she still shifts and shimmies trying not to look like she's uncomfortable if he gets too sentimental, if she feels too close. Half of the time he isn't certain about anything, half of the time he wonders if she wishes she didn't want him, half of the time, half of all the time they have.

They're not going to live forever, and he's finding it harder to care.

As for the rest of the crew, they are remarkably oblivious. Yes, the two of them never appear to spend time together, but sometimes Kara will be the only person to mumble a response to something Lee will lightly say from all the way across the room, or he'll catch her eyes laughing when something happens he knows she'll find funny when they're seated at separate tables. They aren't the subject of rumor or novelty they might have been shortly after they met, which makes things easier. It is still a game, keeping everything under wraps, but there's a new kind of mischief in it; this time they're both playing.

One day when several pilots have volunteered to help clean up the deck storage rooms, he and Kara have spent the last five minutes in a snickering splash-fight that started with her launching a wet rag hard into the back of his head. When it becomes apparent that they're the only two who are going to show up to help with this room, Kara's look softens on him. She's sitting on one of the tables and scrubbing her fingers through his slightly slick hair.

"You're all wet," she says, wry and pleased, and Lee has to stop her hand at the waistline of his pants.

"We don't have time..."

She cocks an eyebrow speculatively. "What are you saving it for? The dance?"

He makes a thoughtful humming sound. "That's tonight, isn't it?"

"Uh-huh," Kara replies, hops off and into a play-sparring stance and landing a light one-two on his chest. A motiveless reflex: He grabs and holds her by both wrists before her arms can pull away. Still in a practically childish mood, she responds with a short high laugh. The smile, the perfect and powerful slice of those teeth forming a crevice on her face, makes Lee realize what he's about to say.

"I love you, you know that?"

Her smile falls, but not to a frown; her hands pull away but then come back, indecisive, joining her fingers through his.

"You're an idiot," she finally teases. "You know that?"

"Yeah." He laughs.

Then it's uncomfortable for her in a couple seconds, so he spares her by initiating an eager, brief kiss to the mouth and then actually affectionately pushing her back by the shoulder, turning her away, and just in time for somebody to come in after them.

Helo glances inside, seeing Lee first. "Have you seen—There she is." Helo holds up a file in Kara's direction.

Lee backs up to exit the room, nodding on the way out at Helo, who gives an acknowledging greeting.

Half a moment after the hatch is closed behind Lee, she cocks an eyebrow, noticing a self-satisfied smile on her friend's face.

"What?"

Helo shakes his head, laughing.

"What?" Kara demands again.

Helo's eyes stray in the direction of the entrance for just a second, then he smiles and shakes his head. "You think you've got everybody fooled."

"Ah-hah." Kara smiles ruefully. "...Do I?"

Helo lets out a chuckle and gives her a jeering shove to the shoulder. She gives it back.

 

Fight night. After Kara's just knocked down Racetrack, it's Helo versus Apollo, and Kara arrives back at the scene in time to see Lee hanging over the ropes to joke with Sam about something.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Sam is saying, giving Kara a one-arm squeeze as she walks up. "You break a leg, Apollo."

"Hey, yeah. Break two," Kara adds, and winks. Lee just kind of rolls his eyes at her, gives Sam a wave before he goes to sink back into the audience, gets back to revving himself up.

It turns out to be the most fiercely charged of the friendlier fights, soon attracting the most booming noise from the crowd yet, the most bets. Kara manages to be the one rearing up most of the excitement; everyone close to the fight can hear her jeering yells above all the rest, her brows fierce and her knuckles gripped tight at the ropes.

One jab to the face knocks Lee a few steps back; he shakes it off.

"Get him!—You bitch, c'mon!!!" Kara shouts.

Helo gets a couple punches under Lee's guard, and then she's doing a kind of angry hop, crawling up the ropes in the corner and hollering sharp: "Apollo, you _motherfrakker_—if I'm out thirty bits on you your ass is getting kicked twice tonight!"

That particular encouragement proves to be a mistake: A stunned Lee turns his glance just slightly towards Kara, and Helo blows a left hook that smacks him spinning into the ropes. He falls to his knees but trembles up; Tigh blows the whistle.

When Helo's getting water from his wife, Lee just grabs himself up, momentarily ignoring Cottle to turn a look of confusion on Kara, lips snarling to move over the plastic in his mouth. "Yuh belm..."

She moves up and reaches right between his lips, snatches out his mouthguard. "What?"

He asks, "Your bet's on me?"

For a second she just looks straight at him, like she doesn't get why this surprises him. Then her mouth slowly curls into a silent laugh. She tucks his mouthguard back in between his teeth, picks up his water bottle and pours him a few swallows before patting him coachingly on the jaw.

"Don't lose."

He doesn't. For the rest of the fight he catches Helo's weakest blocks with clever speed and even a good-humored attitude; the match just turns to so fast it's fun, and it's finally with a more or less level head but extremely windstruck, grinning exhaustion that Helo stays down to hug the mat with a groan.

Lee is accepting a well-done nod from his dad, shaking off his sweaty hair, when Starbuck catches his eye: Her eyes gleaming like that, you'd think she just won the fight, even in the gesture she gives that seems to be some half-effective imitation of gratitude. Her eyebrows flit up and down a couple times as she presents, unfolded and crisp, the nice fat number on her prize cubit bill between pinched fingers, before she crumples it into her fist and kisses the knuckles.

He cocks an eyebrow; he yells, "Yeah, and what do I get?"

Why is she laughing like that? Maybe the whole crowd, still rowdy from the excitement of the last bout, is wondering. Wondering what she's doing running back down to center, clutching fast to hoist herself up into the ring.

The part that will always be funny to everyone else is that Lee Adama looks every bit as shocked about it as half the people in the crowds. The witnessing masses, already loud with cheers and curses, become almost maddened with amusement, their voices a sudden chorus of galvanized crowing at what happens rather quickly: Kara Thrace jumps with comfortable eagerness into Lee's arms and clutches herself around him, her thighs and legs shifting and locking around his waist when his gloved hands can't hold tightly to her torso, in a way far too much like a lover for this to make much of any sense, for a second.

Even as Lee holds to the familiarity of her body, the immediate flustered look on his face makes Kara toss her head back in that short snicker of hers that's like a flint spark of a prayer; this happens only a second before the arc of her neck retracts, her head coming back down, the movement orchestrated by one of her forearms bringing his head up in an insistent cradle before she kisses him, _mine_, at the dizzy spinning axis of so many roaring voices.


End file.
